


The Monster’s Witcher

by sharlatanka



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher (Video Game), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Eskel is always the one left to deal with all the shit, F/M, Grieving Eskel, This Fic Has Everything, Velen (The Witcher), Young Witchers (The Witcher), Young monster love, dead bodies, idolatry and hijinks, troll wedding
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2021-01-01
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:15:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 28,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27724682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sharlatanka/pseuds/sharlatanka
Summary: Eskel and Luchezara plan to set off for Velen to build a fair world for monsters and men. But first, Eskel must stop haunting the graves of Kaer Morhen. They find the inhumane among the humans of Velen. At the same time, Velen’s long-haunted residents prove they can see the humane in the non-human. An ancient threat rises again to lay claim to the region, with Eskel in its sights.An episodic series following after the events of “In My Skin, Refuge.” It also takes place post-Witcher 3
Relationships: Eskel (The Witcher)/Original Female Character(s)
Kudos: 10





	1. The Ghost of Kaer Morhen

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! Before you start this one if you haven’t read “In my Skin, Refuge” on my page then I encourage you to do so! This fic is its sequel. You Must Experience the Original Character Arch and her original meeting with Eskel first. :) <3

She had woken up in the middle of the night, shivering, teeth chattering in the early spring frost. Alone. Alone, for the last several nights. It was an odd time to learn that she had grown to love a sleepwalker.  _ Would it change things?  _ She often asked herself, jokingly.  _ I  _ am  _ a shapeshifter. Better give him something exciting to be, too.  _

Still, it was an odd time to start the habit. Luchezara had been recuperating for a quarter of the year at Kaer Morhen with Eskel, and he’d only started his midnight constitutionals recently. Her wounds were on the mend, and with it, their time at the fortress would come to an end. Perhaps the stress was affecting him. They had big plans together, after all— a move to Velen, to embed themselves into a community, help rebuild the region formerly washed in blood and trampled by ghouls and rotfiends. Velen was also formerly home to countless godlings, sylvans, harpies, nekkers, dopplers like Luchezara, and other relicts who had settled there before humans, and, as humans do when coming in second place to other intelligent beings, were summarily slaughtered to near extinction. If any were to survive the next decade, Velen had to stabilize, and knowledge and respect for non-humans had to be built into its foundation. Only this would stop the endless cycle of bloodshed and cursing, even after Nilfgaard had trampled their way out. 

“What better way is there to model a new, better world than a human in love with a monster?” She teased him often over the map of the continent with suitable locations for their new life marked in charcoal. 

“Should we be telling people they should start going out and fucking harpies?” He’d shoot back, a different monster every time. 

“It may be possible, but without my extensive research and expertise in non-human communication and linguistics, we’ll never know.” She’d shrug. “Next time we’re out riding, and you scope out a harpy nest, I’ll duplicate one and then we’ll know. Unfortunately I’ll have to pretend that you’re someone who I don’t enjoy fucking regularly, and that may be impossible.” 

“ _ Please.  _ Call it ‘making love.’” He laughed at his own barely-a-joke during a usual morning breakfast at the map. They had laid it out over one of the old dining tables in the keep. His laugh was warm and deep, and resounded across the empty dining room. She did love him; she didn’t need to ‘make’ it. The finer points of the common tongue were sometimes yet lost on her. 

“Besides,” he added. “Other humans don’t really see me as one of their kind, you know.” He was excited at the prospect of change. He was anxious to live among people, real people, to make tangible good in their lives and to set every stereotype about Witchers right. He was anxious, and slightly afraid. He wondered if she was, as well, having experienced very recently the most violent hatreds for non-humans that the North had to offer. “Looch,” he started, ever frank in both pet names and sincerity, “Are you afraid?” 

She swallowed and looked down at the map— such a harmless, kind, abstract little thing, compared to the world in its full, cruel dimensions. True to her nature, she masked whatever was churning behind her opaque grey irises. “Did you always laugh like that? When you were a boy, in a room like this?” 

He sipped his tea and looked out over the vacant space. “No, not always. Mutations changed how we grew. And I think puberty hit me like a battering ram, besides.” He watched her brow furrow, an attempt to understand the metaphor. He smiled into his mug. He replaced it on the table and nonchalantly passed between his palms. “I don’t remember laughing much when I was a boy. It was only after we were sure we weren’t some of the dead ones that we laughed a lot, me and Geralt.”

“And Lambert?”

“We laughed  _ at  _ Lambert. But by then I already sounded like I do now.” 

Luchezara tried to imagine a fourteen year old with such a baritone. She reached for his hand and threaded her fingers between his. He was always so warm; something about him always felt more alive, more vital. “This is a bit what it’s like, when I inherit the memories, personality of someone I become. Echoes in a long hall. Sometimes they’re crystal clear, but others I can barely understand.”

He was thinking, eyes cast far along the hall at something and nothing. She wondered if he had inherited all of Kaer Morhen’s memories in his own way. She wondered if they plastered the walls like paper, or if they ricocheted past his ears every once and a while, always threatening to get that perfect headshot. She squeezed his palm.

He declared quietly, to that something and nothing, “We’re going to change things. We’re going to make sure that the world can go on without Witchers. We’re going to make sure that no more children are fed to this death machine again.” 

“It’s going to take a while. Maybe all our lives.” She told him. 

“Whether they be long or short.” 

She got up and walked behind him to give his tense shoulders a squeeze. “I’ve only been in this body for a couple of years, and I’m as old as the Conjunction. Probably.” She’d also only been aware of the human concept of time for those couple of years. “I’m not even sure I’ll age. You’re what, a hundred? They’ll be long. Long lives, eternal lives, till we’re sick of each other. Then I’ll kill you.” 

He snorted slightly, and she felt his shoulders relax. He stood up after her and squeezed his arm around her head, like he used to do with Geralt, Lambert, and the other novices. “Pretty disrespectful to think I wouldn’t know how to kill a monster, Looch. I mean, come on, you can’t even protect your own head while we’re  _ talking  _ about murder.” She yelped playfully and pawed at his forearm. Then, unlike he used to do with his young combative cohort (save for days when he was very happy to see them), he planted a kiss on the crown of her head and released her. 

Luchezara puffed a lock of hair away from her reddened face and marched backwards in front of him out of the hall. “Oh, please. You wouldn’t ever see it coming. I know that necklace you wear doesn’t detect dopplers. Can’t, in fact. The sheer amount of times I’ve startled you for fun when I’m literally the only other living thing that isn’t a goat in this entire keep proves that much— ‘ _ Ah! Looch, you made me drop the goat feed. Aah! Looch, you made me fall down the stairs!’  _ Pssh. Get over yourself.” 

Eskel could only smile at her. They way they often joked together brought some life back into the mausoleum of a fortress. He’d always had similar conversations with Geralt and Lambert, but never conceded so quickly. “You know, I would be happy to let you kill me.” 

She shrugged and shifted to walking beside him with a twirl of her feet. “Oh, I’ve done it before. I wish I had some testimonials to offer you, but I made those men so perfectly dead that it would be impossible— a testament to my good work.” She was able to rib, now, about all that had happened to her, and what she’d done, even though at times guilt still tugged at her gut. She grinned, one corner of her lips forever jagged and lopsided, pulled apart too far and showing too many teeth thanks to the long, warped scar that was left from her journey to Kaer Morhen. It ran from the corner of her left lip to nearly her ear. It had basically healed, turning from red to pink just as the winter snow started to melt. He’d thought that the end of the healing process might devastate her as his own did him when he and his reflection were forced to come to terms with the fact that although it would never get worse, it would certainly never look “better.” Instead she had rushed to the mirror when the final dressing had come off for good, and cried from joy. The scar made herself her own, now, she told him; it was her own body, not someone else’s stolen life. 

“I was like a ghost for so long, walking around in a dead girl's skin, holding on to fragments of her memories, afraid to put them down.” Although she would never be able to shapeshift again without the scar giving away her identity or unsuccessful adoption of another, the scar had freed her from the fear and guilt she felt obligated to perform after taking on the form to survive in Novigrad. 

They went about their day after breakfast as they always did over the last few months: consolidating as many of the keep’s resources as they could so that they would fit into a wagon, and condensing as many research texts as possible into a book that would be easily accessible in the field. The unsaid side of their preparations was that they were preparing to close the doors of Kaer Morhen for good. Eskel was the last to regularly stay there. Geralt spent most of his down time in Toussaint. Lambert was fleeing from his own grief by never taking a break from the Path. But every winter, Eskel returned— to take care of the goats when the grass turned to frost, he claimed. There was less than a week left until the move. The goats already had their reserved spots on the caravan. Something else was luring him back, again and again. 

Luchezara thought about what she’d told him about feeling like a ghost. That night, after an exhausting day of copying extensive bestiary notes with her own modifications and carefully uprooting what survived in the garden and replanting it all temporarily in heavy pots for the road, she woke up cold in the middle of the night again, alone. 

Determined not to wait the several hours it usually took him to come back, she walked the halls abd grounds until she found him kneeling outside over a cellar. In the twilight, she almost thought she’d seen a ghost. Still believing him to be sleepwalking, she stepped towards him and gingerly touched his arm, ready to move if he suddenly woke up with a start and possibly a powerful sign (aard and not she, after all, was the thing that  _ did  _ send him flying down the stairs after she’d startled him once). 

But he turned to her. She saw those reflective eyes, with wide pupils, stare at her in the dark. 

“Eskel…? What are you doing?” He was still in his bedclothes. She yawned. “If you don’t come back to bed we’ll both freeze to death.” It was an exaggeration, but the feeling was very unpleasant. She found the cold so disagreeable that more than once in the dead of winter he woke up next to a curled up bear cub. 

“I’m sorry,” he breathed. “I didn’t mean to wake you.” His voice was slightly hoarse. “I was just about to come back.” 

“You didn’t answer me,” she reminded him softly. She watched him sniffle slightly and brush the back of his hand across his nose in the dark. 

“Hn…?” He stood up and brushed gravel from his knees.

“What are you doing, there?” She’d not realized there was a cellar. 

He didn’t want to trouble her, but he couldn’t bring himself to say it was nothing. “I’ve been… ah… these past few days, I’ve been… trying to say goodbye… to everyone.”

She was confused. “What do you mean? No one else is here, and the goats are coming with us…” 

Eskel smiled fondly, sadly in the dark, and in the dim moonlight she saw him beckon her to follow him down into the cellar. She followed him into the space previously unknown to her, and the one he’d been visiting frequently. The room was lit with a gentle flame in his palm from a sign that he cast; it licked at his fingers. They cast shadows on the urns that lined the long wall nearly from floor to ceiling. 

“This is a mausoleum.” She murmured aloud.

“It used to be a root cellar.” 

“Who died here?”

He laughed; it was strained, small, almost guilty. She didn’t know that the fortress’ foundation was full of children’s bones. “These are the ashes of all of the Witchers who died the day the Wolf school was destroyed. Vesemir survived, we came back to clear the corpses. Experienced Witchers, novices, mages, and kids we’d just taken in.” 

“What happened…?” 

“Hn…” He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Angry mob. That human propensity for frantic, fearful violence you argue about so often.” 

“You knew of this all that time, and you never told me?” She peered at him through the flame. When he told stories about his childhood, he looked vibrant young. Now, his long years showed on his face— the flame cast every scar and line on his face in sharp relief. “If I would have known, I would never have… if I knew that you truly understood me… if I knew what you knew…” The passing of the harsh winter wasn’t all honeymoon. They argued bitterly about what their changing purpose was to be before they came to a tentative resolution. Her impassioned speeches on the part of non-humanity awakened recent and past traumas. She screamed at him often, and wept, and accused him. He let her do it, and remained steadfast and placid the whole time. There was no hint that he understood her, beyond the occasional spitting in the street and the vulgar names given to him by passersby. 

“I wanted you to like it here.” He explained simply, with a weak shrug. “I wanted you to feel safe. And… I didn’t want your opinion of me to change.” 

“I don’t know what you mean…” 

“Under your feet,” he began with an audible swallow which brought a hoarseness to his voice. “Is where we buried the ashes of all the boys who died during the trials.” 

“How many…?”

“Most. Some would die in their restraints, choked on their own sick. Others would die in the Gauntlet. Some would make it all the way through, but their minds wouldn’t be strong enough for the burden of what they’d gone through, how they’d changed— they’d hang themselves. All of us who survived became a part of this. We made the root cellar a grave, so that new recruits wouldn’t know how high their odds of death were. Lambert always called the Wolf School a killing machine. ‘More effective than an abortion,’ you’ve probably heard him say.. I didn’t agree. I didn’t want to understand him. It’s… it’s only now, when it’s all ending, that I can appreciate what he meant.” 

The air was thick and thin at the same time. It felt oppressive. Bone-aching cold arrested the heat around the flame. 

“For a long time I could accept the cost. I thought the work was too important to abandon. But the world began to think differently. Still, these lives weren’t all in vain as long as we all kept returning. As long as we kept up the rituals, it seemed like all these kids died for something, rather than nothing. And now, as the last one to blow out the torches for the last time,” his breath caught in his chest. The flame faltered. “It feels like I’m the one reducing their deaths to nothing.”

“It’s strange to me that you worried about telling me.” She said after a moment so quiet she could hear the flame flutter. “After all, my first memory in this body was death. Looking down at a corpse and realizing the corpse was also myself. I was dead and alive. I was myself, and I was her, this poor, murdered girl in the sewers. I got to live because she died. She was dead and it wasn’t my fault… but I chose to carry on wearing her skin, didn’t I? So I must feel guilty for something. I have to feel guilty for something.” She had sat with the thoughts for so long that they flowed easily from her. The way that Eskel spoke, he must have avoided his own thoughts until he couldn’t anymore. “It happens automatically, you know. I needed a form to keep me safe in Novigrad, and I came upon her first. But it didn’t stop me from screaming. That’s all I could do for the first day: wailing, weeping. All of a sudden I could rationalize death and grief the way humanoids do. It’s terrible, you know? It’s terrible… Dijkstra’s men found me there, naked, throwing my body against the door to the bathhouse plumbing system so that I could be anywhere but near that corpse— my own corpse, and I, the corpse’s walking, talking death mask.”

“Her ghost.” Eskel breathed in response. 

“Yes. But nothing I could do would bring her back. None of the guilt I felt would change what had happened to her. It would have been evil to return to her family and friends and behave like her, pretend.” She waited for his eyes to meet hers. “What you’re doing here is evil to no one but yourself, but it’s much the same. There aren’t any wraiths wandering the fortress. The dead are all gone. What’s left is nothing but ash and mineral. The only ghost here is you, returning again and again to your haunting place to talk to people who are no longer here; people whose deaths you took part in, people who died whom you could not rescue, but you are not responsible for any of it.” 

She heard his trembling breath in the dark. “Eskel,” she placed a hand over his chest. “Can you accept that?” 

“I… I’m not sure I want to.” He confessed. 

“I understand.” He needed to make sense of all of the death, but the only way to do so was to blame himself. It helped him cope but created new, deeper emotional wounds in exchange. 

“Come with me away from here,” she murmured, not knowing if she meant the cellar, or the fortress itself. “This place is a torture chamber for you. Let it be a resting place.” She led him back above ground to the land of the living. “You need rest, too. I’ll get you back into bed, I’ll make you some tea… maybe I’ll put something special in it, really knock you out…” 

She heard something between a sob and a chuckle behind her. 

True to her word, they returned to the warmer indoors, and she made him tea and tucked the bedding in around him. She sat on the bedside and brushed his hair out of his eyes. They were fluttering closed; their golden tone was even more pronounced when he was tired. “Eskel…?” She whispered. 

“Hn…?”

“You really want to come with me…? You’re sure you’re ready to leave all of this?” 

He smiled blearily and a little mischievously, eyes already shut. “Of course I am… I’m in my childhood bed, and a beautiful monster promises to take me away from all this to live with her forever… I’ve been dreaming about that since I was fourteen.”

“Please… I’m serious.” 

“And I’m in love with you. Now get in, please… it’s cold, do that bear cub thing. ” Before she did, he took her hand. “Looch?” 

“Hm?”

“You didn’t answer me, earlier.” 

“About what?”

“About whether or not you were afraid to go back to Velen, back to people.” 

She smiled. “I’m not afraid. Not if you’re with me.” 

  
  
  



	2. Becoming Human in All the Death of Downwarren

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eskel and Luchezara start their rebuilding efforts in Downwarren after the Crones have torn it apart. Dopplers and Witchers both prove to be lonely approximations of human beings, but in the time it takes a garden to grow, things change for the better. Eskel meets a Godling for the first time in less than ideal circumstances.

“How are we going to explain this, again?”

“Well. We’ll tell them I’m a witcher.” 

“That much is obvious. I meant, how are we going to explain _me?”_

Eskel stopped painting. They sat each on either side of the cabin, a decrepit little squat in the formerly abandoned hamlet of Downwarren that they had been occupied with fixing up for several days. After clearing the ghouls and rotfiends out, they chose a home at random and set about cleaning it inside and out. Eskel did most of the work. Before returning to the forests, Luchezara had only ever lived as a person with furniture and responsibilities for several years, and lived a cushy life in the service of Novigrad’s most powerful men. She had no idea how to white wash a home, or sand floors, or plant a garden. She was a quick study, but mostly she drove the goats away from drinking paint and eating wood shavings. They had come to the out portion of the inside-and-out renovations. Luchezara was putting the finishing touches on the daubing between the fatigued log slats that held the home up while he, the artist of the two, was applying whitewash and some floral designs to the outside to make the Witcher and the _someone’s_ house more inviting to the villagers. The residents, former disciples of the crones, had been chased out after the unfortunate events in Crookback Bog. Small, fractured family by family they returned from their hiding holes in the forest when they saw that their new neighbors had excised the dangers. Luchezara remembered thinking about the bitter irony of making it safe for humans to leave the infested forests and swamps where they had once claimed dominion and slaughtered most of her kind. 

“Listen— and don’t take this the wrong way— what if we say you’re my wife— avoid any deep questions?” 

“I’d like to take that the wrong way.” She shook the pointy end of the spade at him, knowing he meant well but suspicious as to his reasoning. “I’m going to be out in the forest, I’m going to be taking notes, and I’m going to be lecturing these people. They’ll start asking questions.” She brought the spade to her chin and tapped it there while she thought, inadvertently giving herself a cement goatee. “What if I told them I was a student at Oxenfurt university studying the resurgence of agriculture on land made fallow by, uh, let’s say, war?” 

“And you were living with a Witcher?”

“You’re my guide. I pay you for the privilege, we’ll say. Maybe I sometimes kiss you, but that’s not their business.” 

He returned to painting a yellow daisy among some vivid green vines. “You’re a student at Oxenfurt. And you’re a woman. And you’re a half-elf.”

“I’ve defied all the odds, let’s say. What? I can be _something else._ I can be a man, if that’s easier for them to swallow.” 

He grimaced. “More trouble than it’s worth, I think. All I’m saying is, these people are superstitious, they’re traumatized, they don’t need more confusion. Don’t give them a reason to want you gone— that’s the exact opposite of what we want, right? This was your whole idea.” 

“But I can’t be honest.” She grimaced at the drying daub in front of her. 

“You can be honest after we’ve rebuilt a few more villages, you know, when the next ones are already happy to see us.” 

“Wife it is…” she grumbled. 

He feigned a frown. “That hurts, you know… you find being married to me _that bad_?” 

She rounded on him with a twisted smile and a hurled gob of cement, which he just barely dodged. “You’d marry _me?_ Gross.” 

He displayed the golden band that hung from a chain around his neck with a finger. “You’re the one that gave me a ring the second night we met.”

She hopped up to her feet and tousled his head with one hand on her way back inside. “Not like I knew what that meant, at the time. I gave gold jewelry out to anyone, at any time, for any reason— it was all lifted, anyways. Better start a new collection, now. Except I’ve never seen a woman in Velen wear more than coral beads.” 

“I think you’ll manage.”

“ _Ahem--”_ A voice from behind them interrupted. 

They both turned towards the voice and stood. It was a middle-aged man, thin, but must have looked more substantial before the Crones incident, judging by the fit of his clothes. He seemed shocked at first at the sight of their marred faces, but calmed down quickly. He had, after all, seen much. 

He spoke. “My name is Calvin. I’m the former ealdorman’s son.” 

The two men shook hands. “Eskel. I’m sorry about your loss, what happened here.” Eskel said. 

“Thank you. It couldn’tah been helped.”

Luchezara also extended her hand, but it wasn’t taken. He barely looked at her except for the occasional nervous glance to the scar that severed her profile in twain. 

“And thank you for clearing the monsters out. We’d already lost many, and more while trying to survive in the swamp. We’ve barely three living children in all the village, and even less coin with which to pay you.”

“So long as you don’t mind a Witcher living here for what,” he looked towards Luchezara. “Several months?”

She nodded. “Probably.” She extended her hand again. “Luchezara.”

Calvin grunted in acknowledgement, but didn’t return the gesture. 

“She’s uh… my wife.” Eskel amended, noting the cold reception.

“Didn’t know Witchers got hitched.”

“Me neither.” Eskel heard Luchezara mutter from the side of her mouth. 

“To a half-elf, no less. Scrawny one. But I guess Witchers can’t be choosy, huh?” Calvin laughed. 

Eskel, normally an expert at mediating with backwoods villagers and an old hat at receiving insults without batting an eye, was having trouble with the conversation. “Hah, well… I think you’re mistaking my familiarity, here… That’s not really worth it to talk about…” 

Luchezara, a native of the forests near the Pontar and who learned to speak in the alleyways of Novigrad, was less gracious. “You know we’re out here solely to make sure Downwarren survives the ass end of this war and the monsters out here in the swamp?”

“She’s right,” Eskel added. “And if you’re planning on taking up the ealdorman title, we should talk. I mean, of course, the three of us…”

The other man crossed his arms and pursed his lips. “We trust Witchers. Only barely. But what credentials does this little one got?”

Luchezara sputtered. “I’ll have you know I’m a student at Oxenfurt University.”

“Right.” He chuckled. “Whaddya study there?”

She had thought this far ahead in theory, but not in practice. “...Wartime agriculture.”

“My feminine cousin Erik went on to study something faffy at Oxenfurt. We all know that school’s been closed on Radovid’s orders.” He narrowed his eyes. Eskel chewed on his lip. Luchezara stared back at Calvin the ealdorman’s son nervously. Caught in a lie already? It had barely been a week. “Guess it doesn’t matter what species,” He ribbed Eskel jocularly, but his arm was swatted away. “Women of all kinds can’t help talking nonsense, huh, Witcher?”

Eskel took a deep breath and sucked his teeth, seemingly judging his next moves. “That’s not true, Calvin. I hope you know that’s not true,” he began, shockingly calm in the same way Luchezara had seen him often meditating. “If your father thought the same, I believe that the Crones justly took him out of this world. We’ll keep your community safe and rebuild it best we can; but, ealdorman or not, we’ll not deal with you for it.” 

“What?”

“You all as a collective certainly don’t have coin to pay a Witcher, but for our protection _you’ll_ have to pay us personally. Looch,” 

She couldn’t hide her delight. “Yeah?”

“Get a good enough look at this asshole?” If later on, they needed the authority of the ealdorman, they wouldn’t need the man himself. Hiding and explaining away the scar would take some thinking, however. 

“Oh, too long.” 

“Now fuck off. And be on your best behavior. We’ll be here a while.” 

Calvin the ealdorman’s son grumbled something about _fuckin’ freaks_ , and spat on the ground near Eskel’s boots. When Eskel stepped forward a bit, the man nearly tripped, pivoting away as fast as he could. The way the surviving and returned villagers stepped away from him made Luchezara think that he wasn’t as popular of a potential leader as he thought he was. 

“Huh.” Eskel rubbed at his cheek scars and stared out into the village clearing. “Never told someone to their face to fuck off before.” 

“Never?” 

“It usually meant the difference between eating or going hungry for a week. But now that I have my own home… some kind of a garden… I guess it doesn’t matter.” 

“Did it feel good?” 

He grinned. “Yeah, it did.” 

“I think you should do that more often, then. In the meantime, we figured out the solution to our _me_ problem. They just don’t care what women do.” 

“Does _that_ feel good?” 

Luchezara rubbed her own scar, a habit she’d picked up from him. “Not really.” She grabbed his arm and stared pointedly into his eyes. “I’m asking you again, respectfully, to reconsider the idea of me just becoming a man.” 

“Looch—“ 

“It would make my job so much easier. Any man. Any man you want. Lambert. Geralt. One of the bandits you killed on the way. That guy— I’ve already forgotten his name. Or _you. Eskel—“_

“Most of these people have already seen your face. It’s a hard one to forget.” 

“You’re right.” She sighed. “I’m going to disappear into the forest to see if I can’t find better company. I’d like to remind myself why I’m doing this in the first place. Do you want to come with me?”

“Sure. Heard from Geralt that there’s supposedly a godling around here.” 

The villagers were desperate, of course, but they wouldn’t dare touch a Witcher’s property. There wasn’t a thing in the house anyway, but Eskel was confident that the goats and the garden they had replanted would stay where they were. When they could, they planned to give out a few young kids and beet roots. He realized, almost joyfully mundanely, that it was one of the first times he would be giving something away and not begging for his own tithe. He whistled as he walked— the song his mother always used to sing. The two of them took a relieved breath upon walking away from the center of the village and stepping onto wild ground— swampy, but wild.

“You know, when Vesemir died I told everyone I wanted to go live by the water.” One of his boots sank into the much with a threatening squelch. He furrowed his brow. “It’s up to my ankles now. Somehow I’m not as relaxed as I thought I would be.” 

Luchezara only realized she had walked far ahead, lost in thought, when she heard the distance in his voice. Much more light-footed than he was, she stepped back to him and avoided the bubbliest parts of the swamp. Two days prior they had gone to the unpleasant task of catching as many fish and bottom-feeding mollusks and frogs as they could manage and scattered the mish-mash of fishy flesh nearer to a nearby shallow lake. It was an experiment to see whether drowners would resettle themselves towards a new (temporary) food source and away from the village. It seemed as though it worked. “At least it’s a little more peaceful now. But watch these humans start complaining about how they can’t go to that lake when there’s nothing there but minnows and snakes.”

She bent down to help clear the mud around his boot and pull it from the quagmire. “Humans shouldn’t be living in a swamp, anyway. All your bodies are way too big. You just sink.” There were several more complaints ready for her to deploy. “‘Oh, we can’t come back until we can pass those monsters, the drowners, safely! Please, master Witcher, please! We’re starving!’” She did an accurate imitation of a villager, helped by the fact that she was literally speaking with one of their voices. “‘But we can’t eat the drowners, oh no— because they look too much like humans!’ Well! Which one is it! Are they monsters or more like humans? Give me a break…” 

He chuckled. “Have a little mercy. Drowners taste rancid.” On the Path, what one ate wasn’t always a choice. 

Her mood lifted when she looked up at his face. He always had the same kind of expression when he thought he was being funny. The scarred corner of his upper lip twisted up and his thick brows pitched up toward his forehead almost absurdly. Her lips twisted too, into a demure smile. “Thank you… for standing up for me back there. You didn’t have to. And you really shouldn’t have. I would have sucked it up; we need these people to like us, after all.” They started their walk again, her in the lead demonstrating worldly where the most solid ground was.

“Yeah, well,” he shrugged bashfully. “Don’t really know how we can make Velen better by deferring to authority figures with minds like that.” 

“Maybe in a month you’ll be the new ealdorman. They might not even want you to leave.” The emotional distance in her voice was clear to him. They’ll want _you,_ not _you and me._

“I’ll just have to say that I’ve got to report to _my_ ealdorman. She’s barely three and a half cubits tall but she’s got a mean bark, so I do what she says.” He sat down on a rock and inspected the muddy mess made of his boot. 

“Eskel,” She chided. “I wasn’t done being sweet with you.” He wasn’t used to being liked, he always said. It was easier for him to deflect attention with a joke— except his jokes were never any good in the opinion of anyone but him. 

She stepped forward and hugged his neck. The swamp was cold and clammy, but he was always warm as if she was standing near a fire. He smelled like the sweat of healthy exertion and the clove oil he used to shave. 

“I thought that in Novigrad I was well-loved,” she murmured into his neck. She felt his arms circle her back. “But it wasn’t exactly true. I was well-cared for. But I was treated like a child. No one ever valued my mind like you do.” 

“Without your mind I could not have imagined that I could choose to be happy… or that I could have a purpose in life beyond being a cog in an endless shit cycle.” A cycle of violence and pain that would bear down on his mind and body until both gave out— to the jaws and belly of some beast, or by his own hand. Witchers were nearly immortal, until suddenly they were dead.

He heard her sniffle. The emotion that burned her cheeks warmed his neck uncomfortable. “Looch…” 

“When is it supposed to feel better? To be here, among people, like this?” Her back shuddered under his arms; he pulled her closer. “You’re here with me, and before this we were living alone for months… but I’ve never felt so alone as here.” Folk would talk to a Witcher when they had to. Even in the palatable form of a half-elf, she was avoided and ignored that week, although plenty of whispers circled.

“I’m sorry…”

“It’s not your fault.” She pulled back to examine his expression, to make sure he knew. 

He knew, of course. He was sorry because he understood her, perfectly this time. Eskel knew exactly how it felt to assume that one would be accepted back into the world, only to learn that the world one returned to was not the world from which one was originally taken. He had to learn to see the world with new eyes— golden, inhuman eyes. Downwarren was not Novigrad. Their little wooden hut without even a bed was not her richly appointed room at Sigi Ruevens. The villagers were not Dijkstra or the disciples of Francis Bedlam, who embraced the Other and entertained whatever she fancied, so long as she was useful to them. Mistrust and fear kept Velen’s villagers alive through the war, and her value to them would take strenuous convincing. 

But it would happen. He would make sure of it. “It’ll be better soon. I promise.” He brushed her cheeks with his fingertips. She lowered herself onto his lap and laid her hands over his and kissed him deeply. It seemed like the first moment of quiet they’d had since they’d slain (or rather, Eskel had slain) the final ghoul in the village. Although repaired, the walls of their little home were not too thick, and she had emptied some of their jars of preserves to store the eyes and brain matter of the ghouls (“what, after all, is the defining natural difference between such monsters and myself?”). They, in essence, had eyes on them even in their private time. 

They both later realized the value of the silence around them. It had restored some of her confidence and vigor. Kaer Morhen was quiet, quieter than the swamp, but not by much. She whispered just as much in his ear when their lips briefly parted. It was where she had shown him how to make human love in quite inhuman ways, like the monsters that she bragged they both were. Her hands, one snaking under his shirt and the other pressed to the worn leather of the crotch of his pants and fumbling for their laces, urged his own to wander. While his lips were on her neck, he was easily able to pull loose the side laces of her wool bodice and the ties of the stiff stays underneath. Her light, surprised gasp as the rough calluses on his palm dragged against her nipples elicited a low moan from his chest. With his other hand he helped her with the belt and laces of his pants until she held him in one warm hand. He then made easier work of walking his fingers along her thighs under her chemise and into her hose. In the chilled spring air the heat of hidden skin felt as though it could have scorched. They pressed together, exchanging breath for trembling breath, their bodies recognizing the form and language of one another in this new home that was so alien. 

They were not the only ones who were recognizing bodies there in the swamp. “ _Excuse me, I’ll thank you_ please _to put your knob_ away _in my front garden!”_ A childlike voice warned, and loudly. 

In her surprise, Luchezara might have squeezed a bit harder onto her partner with her fist than she would have meant to, otherwise. Eskel yelped and jumped, inadvertently knocking her into the mud. “ _Looch—!”_ The regret and concern for her he felt was instantaneous, but he had trouble focusing on what his next action should be. 

She slipped and stumbled her way back to her feet. From head to toe, her back was covered in mud. She held her open bodice closed with one hand over her stomach. She looked at the source of the intruding voice, and then at Eskel, unceremoniously clutching one hand around his penis while the other struggled to pull both legs of his pants over his hips. His belt was somewhere, but he had no free hands left to find it. 

“Eskel,” She laughed incredulously. “We found the godling.” 

“No, no—“ the godling corrected. “ _I_ found _you_. I found you disturbing the peace around my home, to be precise!” He was small, no taller than a child, and barely clothed himself. His skin was almost iridescent, his hair ragged and vibrant copper, and his eyes were wide and large— perhaps now even more than usual. He used them to stare daggers at the couple. “So what exactly do you think you’re doing here?” 

“We came out here to find you!” 

“Looks like you came for something else.” 

Luchezara looked to Eskel for some help, but he had lumbered off behind the rock to find his belt, cursing all the while. 

“Well—“ She began, haphazardly tying her bodice back together. “We got distracted, you see— we just moved here from the north, and I’m in a very emotional place, because—“ 

The godling narrowed his eyes and grimaced. “Why would two people move to Velen? Now?” 

“ _Interesting question—_ Eskel…?” 

“My shitting _fucking_ belt sunk into the _fucking mud_ …!” He cried from behind the rock. She turned back to the godling with a wide apologetic smile. “What’s your name?”

He crossed his arms. “What’s yours?” 

“Luchezara.” 

“Got a second name?”

“No. Do you?”

“No. And the name’s Johnny.” 

“We have more than that in common, Johnny.” She assured him. “I’m a Doppler. I came back here from Novigrad to help make Velen home for creatures like us.” 

“Bullfarts.” Johnny huffed. “Prove it.” 

“Why would I lie?” 

“I said prove it. No more Dopplers left in Velen anymore. Used to be some of my best friends. Prove it, or you’re playing a cruel joke on me.” 

Eskel finally dug his belt out from the muck and stood up to catch the transformation from behind her. He’d never actually seen it before. Her bones moved under her skin like fish just under the surface of water. The color and shape of her skin changed like shifting shadows. Suddenly, there were two Johnnies— one standing in a slightly oversized, muddy blue wool dress. 

“Who’s that?” The first Johnny asked, unimpressed.

“It’s _you!”_ Luchezara-Johnny barked. 

“S’not like I’ve got a mirror round here, though, do I!” He argued. “I don’t think I look like that.” 

“You look exactly like this!” She shifted back to herself to the sound of popping bones and tightening seams. “But it’s proof enough, right?”

“Yeah, I suppose so. Who's the man with the knob out?” 

“Eskel.” He muttered, stepping over to them with his mud-caked belt back around his waist. “And it’s no longer… _out_. It’s back in.” 

“It’s back in.” Luchezara repeated assuredly, with a gentle smile. 

Johnny gasped at the full sight of the man and his eyes, which, try as he might have to hide them from embarrassment, were reflective all the same. “Oh, you buried the lead! That’s a _Witcher’s knob!_ Uglier Witcher than the one I know. _”_

“I would appreciate it if you would stop saying ‘knob.’”

“Why? It’s a great word!” 

“Well, you’re a _child,_ so I feel quite bad about it, is all.” 

Johnny scowled and stomped his foot into the mud. He pointed an accusatory finger at Eskel. “Listen, _chump._ I’m older than you’ll ever be. Don’t worry about me.” It almost sounded like a threat. Eskel had never actually met a Godling; his voluntary trips to Velen had been, understandably, few and far between in his life. “So what’s a Doppler doing rubbing elbows and what else with a Witcher? Now I’m interested!” 

“We’re rebuilding Velen.” Luchezara told him. Eskel softened at the excitement and hope that laced her words. She really did need to talk to a non-human in Downwarren. “And I belong here. _You_ belong here. Every creature like us who was ever impaled on a human’s halberd has belonged here. We’re going to make Velen a home for us all again.” 

“You and what army?” 

“Well, for starters…. ah, with _you.”_

“I’m not following.” 

“Here’s my proposal, Johnny. You come live closer to the village—Downwarren. Do your thing: help gardens grow, leave little gifts, help the people see the benefits of living with monsters like us.”

“They get benefits, and what do I get? Chased out with a pitchfork?” 

She crouched down to his height. “We’ll get you things. Anything you want, until the villagers start leaving you gifts, too. Food, tools, books with lots of new words— and goats! We’ve got goats for you to play with. The village has some kids, too. I’m sure they’d love to play with you. After what happened in Downwarren, they need a little helper. They need you, Johnny, or they won’t survive. They just don’t know it yet.” 

“And I’ll protect you. From drowners, and humans, if need be.” Eskel added. 

Johnny paused, seeming to consider the offer. “You the ones that chummed the lake and drove the drowners away?” 

“Yes.”

“Class act, if I ever saw one!” 

Eskel felt strangely touched. “Ah… thank you, Johnny.” 

Johnny looked askance with a worried gaze, and then spoke in almost a whisper. “You aren’t afraid of the crone?” 

“The crones are dead,” Eskel said. “Geralt killed them.” 

“He got just the two. The weavess fled, although I’ve not seen hide nor hair of her since. She won’t like you changing Velen. The crones feed off of Velen’s fear. If Velen folks stop needing her protection, she won’t be happy.”

It had been a long time since Luchezara had heard anything about the crones. She swallowed an old lump of fear in her throat that was catching her voice, but Eskel spoke up before she could. 

“The crone won’t touch you, Johnny. I promise. I’m sure I can make quick work of her, if she’s still alive.” 

Johnny stopped to think for a few more moments, pacing briefly around a tree. He stared at Luchezara with his big eyes. She stared back with hers. “Can you promise me I’ll never see his knob again?” 

“I promise you: you’ll never see Eskel’s penis again.” 

Eskel pinched his brow in exasperation. And shame— a little of that was left. 

“And no more drowners to bother me?”

“If they bother you, you can come and stay in our house, and we’ll drive them away again.” 

Johnny pursed his lips. “Fine. I’ll move. But you have to help me move, find a better burrow near the village.”

“It’s done.” She said. Johnny spit in his palm and held it out. She spit in hers. They slapped palms together and sealed the deal. 

The three of them set off back towards the village. Johnny skipped to cover the same ground as Eskel’s long stride. “You know, I haven’t met too many witchers in my time. But you and that better looking one-- what was the name of him ....”

“Geralt.” Eskel sighed, grateful to have something else to talk about. 

“Yeah! Geralt. You and Geralt were the only ones never to start swinging your sword at me.” He puffed out his chest and added, just in case, with some bravado, “I always dodged it, of course.” 

Eskel shrugged. “Me and Geralt had the same teacher. Always told us murdering an intelligent monster that didn’t want to hurt anyone wasn’t worth it-- not worth the guilt, and not worth the coin.” He had to admit to himself, however, that there had always been times when he’d preferred to just do the bloody work he was asked to do. It seemed easier for Geralt to negotiate his terms and make his own way, perhaps because he didn’t look so frightening to people. It hadn’t always been so; but a severe facial deformity was judged more harshly than white hair. After what happened with Deirdre, he stopped taking small contracts and generally only took on large beasts at the behest of officials and nobles, who paid better and generally didn’t need to speak with him before payment. 

“Is that why you’re out here, snogging a Doppler?”

“Ha… a bit. Our teacher wouldn’t have approved, though. For sure.”

“How do you know that a monster’s intelligent? What if I’m a real fool? Would you kill me?”

“Of course not. Intelligent just means I can, uh… have a conversation with you. Understand you.”

Johnny blinked. “Huh. By whose determination?”

“What do you mean?”

“You think that maybe water hags kill humans because they can’t understand them? What about a human who can’t hear none? What about someone from another land?”

He stopped in his tracks. “It’s more complicated than that.”

“Is it?”

_Was it?_

“I guess… I guess that’s why I’m with her, here: to find out how complicated it is.” Eskel smiled while he watched her crawl into hollow spaces under tree roots and tip herself into windthrows while looking for a new home for Johnny. 

“I like her.” Johnny declared. 

“I do, too.”

“Dunno if I like you, though.”

“Well, you haven’t had a chance to get to know me.”

“I’d say I got to know almost all of you in two minutes.”

“Yeah. That’s fair.” 

* * *

As both Eskel and Luchezara soon came to learn, humans were complicated, too. Neither had lived fully in a village before. They had both been sheltered. One, a casteless “mutant” whose only dealings with human society had ever been collecting a reward and begging for a room at an inn; and the other, a shapeshifter who had spent nearly all of her personhood living in a gilded cage and doing the bidding of someone who told her how life should be lived. Even in Kaer Morhen, where the two had spent so much time together, the fortress was large enough for their idiosyncrasies to keep their distance. She hadn’t known, for instance, that upon waking Eskel had to down several shots of white gull to dull several kinds of pain. At Kaer Morhen he had been the one taking care of her; it was only in Downwarren that she understood the toll that a Witcher’s work took on the body. He always drank with her back to her, as if he was ashamed. He knew she saw. She decided to pretend as though she hadn’t. 

Every day he meticulously shaved his face around its rough topography of scars. At Kaer Morhen, he never had. He smiled widely there, under a scraggly, piecemeal beard. When he smiled in Downwarren, it was narrower, mindful of all of the little cuts he inevitably made across his chin. It was only after she insisted on helping him that he told her why he did it. If he would never be considered as human as anyone else, he’d at least command their respect by looking as clean-cut as he could. He was worried about his hair, as well. Too long, and he’d trim it, almost comically, using a bowl over his head as a guide. She decided to take up this task for him, as well. She wondered how it felt for him, to have his inhumanity on the outside-- so different to her own facade. Aside from her own scar, no one assumed much about her. It was a blessing, and, as evidenced by their earlier scuffle with the ealdorman (who eventually abandoned the village for a more inviting environment), a curse. But it was a facade, no matter how much she felt otherwise. She listened to the crisp sound of scissors cutting through his hair. Her own hair never grew. If she decided to take scissors to a lock, she may very well have bled. 

She watched Eskel’s behavior with great interest. He adapted eagerly, and the villagers soon began to see past his scars. They needed help with more than monsters. They needed trees to be cleared, furniture to be made, and fallow land to be turned. He had learned it all in isolation with the other Witchers at Kaer Morhen as an exercise in self-sufficiency. Now he was taking part in creation, rather than destruction. The children in the village weren’t afraid to come closer while he was meditating, mischievously close. He’d open one eye to peer at them, and they’d squeal at the sight and run. But he never ran after them.

One day, they didn’t run away. “Don’t witchers chase kids around, and steal them?” One asked.

Eskel blinked, and noticed the readied stances of their feet and the anticipation in their eyes. How they were holding their breath. 

He smiled. “Would you like to be chased by a Witcher?” 

They bolted, giggling, and he started off after them with comical growls. It became a regular occurrence. Soon he couldn’t take a moment to rest outside without being tackled by a child. It seemed as though he really enjoyed it. They were mostly orphans, he told Luchezara. Just like he had essentially been. He would have given anything for someone to make the world less frightening for him at that age, he said.

As much as Luchezara watched Eskel’s transformation like she was observing an experiment from behind glass, he also noticed how she was adjusting-- namely, how she wasn’t. The villagers still weren’t interested in knowing her or trusting her. She spent her time she was not investing in their home or with Johnny staring into puddles and the middle distance. She came to life when she was with Johnny. During the day she would leave him offerings, or spend time in the swamp talking with him. At night when frequent storms bore down on the valley, she left the window open so that Johnny could come in and sleep between them in their bed above the stove. 

Eskel knew the villagers would come around to both her and Johnny. After another month or two, they did. He overheard the conversation when he was in front of the house one morning fixing a hole in his boot. 

“Didn’t know you had a little one running around.” An older woman said cheerfully as she approached Luchezara as she was tending to the garden (and trying to keep nosy goats away from carrot greens).

“Huh?” Luchezara seemed not to understand at first that she was being spoken to. In the brief moment of confusion, a goat had seized the opportunity to pull a young carrot from the ground. 

“Your little boy, of course! With that wild, wiry hair. Looks just like you, I thought. I saw him just this morning, and two days ago I saw him running around with the other kids.”

“Oh… Johnny.” She smiled. He had stopped by early that morning to trade in a book for another and share information on any monster sightings in the swamp. 

“You seem a little young to be a mother. And I thought Witchers couldn’t have children.” 

“Oh... “ Lia, the unfortunate dead woman from whom Luchezara borrowed her primary form, had a child. It was a child she hadn’t wanted, but felt she had to do right for by sending money to him from Novigrad. “I don’t have a child.” With the sweat over her brow she brushed away her fear at telling the truth. “Johnny is a Godling. He helps me out around here… I’m from Novigrad, you know… everything about this life is new to me.” In more ways than one. 

Eskel watched and held his breath. The woman was silent, but then leaned comfortably over their fence. She began to reminisce about a Godling she knew in her youth; how she didn’t think such creatures still existed; how she thought the tales about them blessing homesteads were all myths. They started an engaged conversation which eventually attracted nearly all the other women in the village. Soon she knew them all by name. 

“The godling is well and good, my dear,” They would say often, “But if you needed to know anything about making a home, you could have just asked.” As older village women were wont to do, soon Luchezara had no more time to lose to despair for all of their uninvited visits. They taught her how to embroider, a new way of adornment. They tied their coral necklaces, family heirlooms to her neck. Their daughters had all been victims of the war, or the crones, or poverty. They fawned over the motherless creature as if she were their own. Luchezara decided to tell them what she was. She asked Eskel to be there, just in case. 

It wasn’t necessary. They weren’t angered, or confused, or afraid. They all had only one question, one request. Could she bring their daughters back for them to embrace, just for one moment? Luchezara did what she could, but the miniature paintings and verbal descriptions they brought her only brought her to tears. She was never able to manage more than an incomplete shift in her facial features. 

_My Kasia’s eyes looked so beautiful in the sun._

_Zoya had beautiful dark hair, just like her father._

_Laura has a birthmark on her wrist the shape of a cattail. It was how we identified her body._

They embraced her after each of her failures and comforted her, mothered her. It was all they really needed. After the revelation about what she was, during embroidery sessions and gossiping about Eskel Luchezara shared with him her knowledge and mission for Velen’s monsters, and they shared their own knowledge of the area and its inhabitants as lifelong residents of Downwarren. They were more than ready for peace, they said, if she was sure she could create it. 

Later that night, as they prepared for bed, Luchezara smiled tiredly. “I can’t believe I was so worried about explaining myself. I remembered another thing I love about humans.” 

“Hn…?” Eskel was half-listening, one arm out the window sensing the air. “Feels like rain. Better leave the window open so Johnny can come in.”

“Humans are fearful, but they’ll form a bond with anything, no matter what they’ve been through. They have to. Even Witchers. Dopplers.” She stood on her toes to kiss him. “And Godlings.”


	3. A Wedding, Five Funerals, and a Pesta

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eskel and Luchezara's work in Velen is sometimes satisfying, sometimes sorrowful, and sometimes surprising. A contract to lift a curse alerts Velen's reigning monsters to their trespassing, and puts Eskel in danger. But how can a lesser monster protect a Witcher?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was probably my favorite chapter to write yet! I look forward to hearing your theories >:)

“So what you’re telling us is that you would like to be able to move from this location and back to your clan.” Eskel repeated slowly and deliberately, attempting to suss out some kind of recognition or any spark of intellect from the eyes of the small group of rock trolls.

“Yes. Is our telling.” Their spokesman, who Eskel could not tell apart from the others, answered. 

They all stood together on a grassy, tree-filled hill to the north east of Velen, overlooking a valley that was normally busy with traveling merchants and marching red-clad armies. Now all were avoiding the passage on account of the newly arrived rock trolls. They had been there for what seemed like three hours, because it had. In between furiously scribbling notes on the exchange into a vellum book, Luchezara scratched at the developing sunburn on her face. 

“And like I said before--” Eskel bent his legs and began to crouch down. 

Luchezara caught his arm and whispered, “You’ve got to stand up. If you sit down, it’s rude…” He blinked at her incredulously. “I know you have bad knees. I know you’re eighty years old. Just… keep standing.” She grinned at him as sweetly as she could from under her tight-feeling, scorched cheeks.

“Monster girl right.” The troll appraised with a satisfied shrug. 

She took a little informal bow and chuckled. “My old best friend was a troll, so--”

“Nowoway! What his name is?”

“Bart.”

“Oh… I know Bart _many_.”

“Too _I_ know many Bart.” Another said behind him. 

“And too _I--_ ”

“That’s alright…!” She waved a hand. “We can figure it out later. Eskel?”

“Thanks…” He muttered, and moved his weight from foot to exhausted foot. “ _Like I said before…_ When you decided to stay here, you displaced a band of Scoia’tael that was using this spot as a camp and patrol point. But according to you, you don’t know anything about that.” They had been hired by the band to clear the trolls without violence, having heard of the couple’s reputation. 

All of the trolls shook their heads. The most erudite among them said, “We no know a Miss Place. Or squirrel.” 

Luchezara stepped in. “Shale--” Somehow she already knew each by name. “Eskel wants to say…. Elves here. Elves here _home_. You here now. Elves here not now.” 

They all nodded, grunting one amongst the other. “Elfies back want here? For home?” Shale asked. He grunted. “Now _ours_ this home. No to go back, old home.”

“You can’t go back?” Eskel asked. “Why not?”

“Where is your old home?”

“Left side of hills. Cliffs. There many cave. Many rock.” One explained. “Shale _bad_ give dowry. No can mate. Worse! For exile Shale _and_ we brothers.”

“Gabbro Shale shame…” Shale muttered. 

“Gabbro _truth_ tell.”

Eskel pinched the bridge of his nose, took a deep breath, and asked as politely as he could, “There’s no way back?”

“Need rocks many. Nice rocks. Dowry better.”

“Your dowry is rocks?”

“Yes. How no?” Shale chuckled. “Witcherman fool… but here no rock. Here grass.”

“You can’t get rocks from the other side of the hill?”

“Well, they’re exiled.” 

“Ah, that’s right…” He rubbed the stubble on his face, and Shale rubbed his own face, too. “What if we bring you some rocks?”

“Nice ones!” Luchezara added. 

“And I’ve got a few tricks to change your clan’s mind, too.”

They seemed to mull it over for a moment before agreeing. Soon Luchezara, light footed, was holding Eskel’s hands to make sure he didn’t fall to his death while stepping across the face of the crag. “Isn’t this better than chopping off their heads?” 

“Ask me when we’re on the ground.” He answered through gritted teeth. “Speaking of, why could they not just dig in the hill for rocks?” 

“If I understand correctly, it’s about the precarity of being on the crag.” She looked him up and down with a scar-twisted smirk. “Creatures overly big have a hard time not falling.” She easily hopped away from him and towards a promising looking rock formation that had been bleached by the sun. 

“ _Ha, ha._ I’ve been trained for this kind of climbing, you know.” A long time ago. And he wasn’t ever the best at it, he’d just been trained to survive it. And not with an arm full of rocks. “We’ll just pick up a few and _Axii_ will take care of the rest.” He watched with bemusement as she worked a glimmering piece of quartz out of the softer rock of the cliff face with her knife. The sunlight flayed across the rough prisms and cast her round face in soft technicolor and the caused golden rings she wore in her ears and in her hair to glow like a halo. “Hey,” He shouted across the crag. They had been traveling together for nearly half a year, were beginning to make a name for themselves and change minds. “You’re brilliant, you know? This thing we’re doing… it’s really working! ...I love you!” 

The light in her eyes made her eyelids flutter and forced her nose to scrunch up, and she sneezed unceremoniously onto the quartz. “I love you too,” She shouted back. “But if you’re not going to pick up some rocks yourself, you should come and hold this one!”

Eskel white-knuckle-gripped his way to Luchezara and she held the quartz out to him. “You aren’t going to wipe your spit off of it?”

“You love me and you won’t touch my spit on a rock?” 

* * *

The exchange of dowry rocks and the return of the exiled rock troll brothers went off mostly without a hitch. The troll clan promised to respect the Scoia’tael, and in return, they could get the bits of Redanian and Nilfgaardian soldiers left behind by the elves. Eskel and Luchezara were invited to stay for the coupling, and to run through all of the Barts that each of them knew to see if any were the one Bart whom Luchezara knew. They declined for more than one reason, in large part because they didn’t want to taste whatever was brewing in their communal cauldron. Five disembodied fingers were still gripping the cauldron’s walls. They left the romantic evening, and Luchezara reminded him that humans were not exempt from the food chain simply because they thought they should be. Despite the strangeness of rock troll customs, the fear of falling from the cliff, handling a rock covered in a sneeze, and Luchezara’s comments about humans role as prey, they managed to find a small dark limestone cave to have a coupling of their own before returning to the Scoia’tael to rest for the night. 

“I didn’t know such a group as yours existed,” Luchezara admitted. The two sat with the small band of elves, two dwarves, and a halfling and shared a meal as the sun set over the hills.

“You’ve really never heard of the Scoia’tael?” Their leader, a noble-looking elven woman with a shorn head. She had at first meeting greeted her as an elf, only to learn the truth soon after. To tell the truth was an easy decision-- Luchezara had not understood one lick of elvish until minutes after they spoke, when she became suddenly, curiously conversational. “You’ve got the body of a half-elf.”

Luchezara shrugged and spoke with a mouth full of roasted foraged vegetables. “From a half-elf who was already dead, and relatively unknown. I suppose there are some elements of a personality that a Doppler can’t recover from something that no longer thinks, or feels. And besides, I haven’t heard of a lot of things that aren’t in Novigrad. The people I lived with didn’t think it was important for me to know much else.”

“But you’re not really _from_ Novigrad, are you? You’re from around here.” 

“Yes.” She laughed, as if it was a normal process anyone might have gone through. “But as a bear cub, or a deer, you don’t really think much about politics or about what you see beyond whether it might prove dangerous to you.” 

“Being out in the wilderness does that to anyone, I guess.” A halfling added, looking back over the hill towards the sound of a wolf’s howl. “But, I’m interested-- why a bear _cub?”_

“I’m not really sure of the rules, I just do what comes naturally,” She explained. “But I’m not the size of a full-grown bear. Hunters and wolves won’t go near a young bear, either, because they assume a larger bear must be nearby. And I suppose the life of a baby bear is a little exciting, as well. Berries, trees… I thought they were the best parts of life, until I, you know, became a person in a blink.” She speared another mouthful of food with her knife and added bitterly, “But when you’re introduced to even better things unwillingly all of the worst things come with it.” 

“What kind of things?”

“Death. Existential fear. Shame. Heartache. Murder. Food poisoning. Stubbing your toe because you have furniture. All you reasoning creatures like to cause yourselves completely avoidable pain.”

They laughed, although she hadn’t meant it as a joke. She smiled anyway; it was often that she wasn’t able to gauge others’ responses to her. She had the ability to speak the common tongue and many other languages, but had trouble using all her words in the correct contexts, contexts of which she often had no experience. 

“And I have to wonder--” Eskel chuckled, deflecting some of the attention after noticing the slight twitch of confusion in her expression. “Why she’d ever choose a Witcher, when all of that comes with the job description.” 

The elf woman grinned. “Well you aren’t quite a Witcher anymore, from what I’ve heard. You’ve had a transformation of a kind, too.” 

He nodded and refreshed the fire in between them by casting a sign. “True. A month or so back, we took on a contract to catch a werewolf, and find a missing daughter. The villagers stalked the werewolf, assuming it had killed the girl. Some of them died as a result. As it turned out, the girl and the wolf were one and the same. It was the secret that was deadly in the end, not her, inherently. Shame and fear turns people into cornered animals, and monsters violent. But before that I could have counted on one hand the amount of werewolves I’d left alive in half a century of work. In the end, we didn’t know how to reverse the curse; it might have been placed on her at birth. But the fact that she was alive mattered more to them; they decided to keep her safe in whatever way they could, so that no one else would die.” 

The rest of the night the group shared stories of the strange bedfellows, allies, and individuals one met in Velen. Both were, after all, attempting to bring order and justice to a land that even before the war had been lawless; and their aims were cut from similar cloth. In the morning, the elf woman declared that they would always have a place with the Scoia’tael. Because they had been cut off from their patrol spot for several weeks, they had nothing with which to pay the Witcher, save for a small black horse with a wide barrel chest, spindly legs, and a short-cut mane. The beast was fit for nothing among the Scoia’tael, but Luchezara readily accepted the payment as _her_ perfect horse. Eskel’s Scorpion, she revealed to the band for seemingly no reason at all, was too tall for her to mount, too wide not to slide right off as she had already done several times, and, as she admitted in a whisper, didn’t seem to like her at all. For the discretion they also threw in a simple saddle. She named him Eel, and they set off for the next town and the next job, or for the next job to find them. Along the way Eskel explained that short, stocky horses had historically been the mount of choice for elven cavalry. They had the stamina in mass numbers to lure in and exhaust an enemy army, but for smaller-scale guerilla operations they had not enough elegance. She just thought the horse looked nice. 

They passed by four villages that had been abandoned without any sign of monsters. The remnants of their populations had fled, from bandits, or armies to their own individual homesteads scattered over the watery valleys. Luchezara had wondered at first what would make them lose such trust in their neighbors. It became all too routine to find birds nests tucked into the rotting collarbones of men and women hanging from Velen’s trees, and hornets emerging from their slack lips. “Wraith bait,” Eskel would mutter, long desensitized to the sight, and cut them down. He explained that they had to stay and make sure the body fully burned, and bury the ashes along with any clothes and belongings. 

Each time she would try to know the person enough in the way that Dopplers did. Enough to assure herself that their funeral would not be so lonely, or so careless. Often it wasn’t possible. Vultures may have gotten to the eyes and the soft flesh of the faces, rendering them completely without identity. She made up a face from the hundreds behind her eyes, and a name, and she said to them that she was sorry. She didn’t tell Eskel this; he sat with his eyes closed each time in practiced meditation. He turned off the world. He wouldn’t open his eyes until all that was left was ashes and scorched bone. He had known enough death that she trusted it wasn’t aloofness, but self-preservation. By the time they decided to stop for the day, they had burned another five of Velen’s organic hornets’ nests. She had never seen a wraith, but she imagined they appeared as the sight of panicked hornets rising from a decaying chest cavity licked by flames. 

Barely four inns existed over the entire expanse of Velen, and by sheer luck as the sun began to set again they had found one. He looked tired, drained from all the death, as she was. She swirled her spoon around her bowl of blood red beet soup. Some days were fulfilling and joyful. Some days were just death, death all the time. Eskel always seemed to be able to eat without thinking about having touched five corpses. “It’s from training,” He would say in the middle of tearing off a piece of black bread with his teeth. “If you didn’t eat when food was in front of you, you didn’t get to eat at all.” She tried to absorb some of the hardened adept ethos by drinking what was left in the soup, but it didn’t lift her constitution any more. It just made her slightly sick. Luchezara told Eskel as much, but he reminded her that it might have also been that all day she was picking berries off of bushes indiscriminately and eating them, which was also something witcher adepts were taught not to do. 

He then employed another training tactic to stave off creeping thoughts of death and dread. He threw his spoon down into his empty bowl and stood, smacking his palms on the table. She jumped slightly. “Target practice,” He told her. “Target practice!”

She rolled her eyes but got up. It had been one of his conditions that if they were to undertake that great mission of hers that she’d have to be able to defend herself in strategic and skilled ways. She tried to protest, saying that in any altercation choosing ‘flight’ over ‘fight’ usually worked for her, but he wouldn’t relent. He led her out of the inn like he was herding a goat, complete with a couple of cheeky pats to the bottom, which at least cheered her up. He took a bag from her horse and they walked to a wooded area west of the inn. The bag opened as it was dropped down onto the grass. It was full of daggers and longer knives taken off the bodies of Velen’s bandits. She felt most comfortable with small knives, the only weapons she’d ever used to defend herself. However, she wouldn’t have dreamt of throwing the gilded knife that had been gifted to her by the late Dijkstra, the knife she’d also used to carve the traumatic scar in her cheek from the left edge of her lip to her ear. 

Although she’d become quite efficient at throwing them during their near-daily practice. She picked one up and held the blade gingerly between her fingers while he marked spots high and low on tree trunks with chalk about fifteen cubits away. She hit most right where the two chalk lines crossed, and others just above-- thrown too hard-- or below-- thrown too weakly. 

“Two days ago you could hit all of them!” He shouted to her between the trees. She trudged over to pull the blades out of the trunks, pressing one leg up against them for leverage to pull out the ones deeper stuck. 

“Two days ago it was daylight! Some of us can’t have night vision and opposable thumbs at the same time, you know.” 

He laughed, but there was a worried tinge to his voice. “At this rate, I worry something might happen to you in a fray before I can even teach you to go for moving targets, or dodge and throw.”

Luchezara picked up a rock and slapped it into his palm. She didn’t want him to worry. Of course, he never thought she was weak or helpless; perhaps she had never properly been on the offensive without being threatened first, but she hadn’t survived all that time by doing nothing. “Throw it, I’ll knock it to the ground.” As he tested the weight of it in his hand, she quietly loosened the laces of her bodice and stays at her side. He tossed the rock up and propelled it into the sky with a sign. 

She dropped the knives. Scales bloomed over her skin. Webbed wings exploded from under the back of her bodice. She hadn’t thought about her hose, which split as she pushed off of the ground and into the air with a tail instead of legs. A siren’s shriek filled the field. It was only for a moment until she caught the stone and fell back down without any grace onto dry ground unsuited for a siren. After one painful-looking bounce she landed on her face, back in her half-elf skin. Luchezara turned herself over and held up the rock in her palm triumphantly, but he was already at her side. He tapped a dull blade gently on her neck.

“A knife is quick. _This_ is not. Not yet, at least. In the time it took you to fall back down and regain your wits after focusing on an airborne target, something on the ground could have easily killed you.”

“That’s not fair,” She complained. “The only flying monster I’ve seen is a siren.” 

He helped her up and started to re-tie her bodice. “It’s never going to be fair. And if you’re going to keep doing that, this needs buttons…” 

“I don’t want you to worry about me, and put yourself in danger.” She said aloud for the first time.

“I don’t worry about you,” He assured her without missing a beat, fingers still twisted up in fabric. “And I will, if I have to. I’ve done a lot more for people I care a lot less about.” 

“Speak of devils…” She watched as several figures walked towards them from the inn, two women and a young man.

“Witcher…!” One of the women shouted. They stopped a few feet from where they would have walked to after noticing the peculiar state of undress of the Witcher’s companion. It was nice, for once, Luchezara thought, to not have their twin scars be the reason someone backed away. “Oh, excuse us, I didn’t realize…”

“What?” Luchezara asked, unbothered. Eskel double knotted the bodice and looked up towards them, “What?” He repeated. 

“W-well... “ The man began. “We came all the way from Mulbrydale when we heard there was a Witcher in our area. People keep dropping dead in the night in Mulbrydale.” They were fairly modestly dressed, but not in rags like much of Velen. 

“We find ‘em in the morning. Already covered in maggots. We can’t explain it.” The woman added. “We think it’s a curse.”

The other woman gripped her arm and shivered. “I’ve heard it in the night. Thought it was a fix at first. But a fox don’t scream like that. Please-- you’ve got to come help us. We can pay you well. We’ve never had such a problem in Mulbrydale…”

“We’ll head there tomorrow morning.” Eskel told them. 

It wasn’t the answer they wanted. “You’d wait here until it takes it’s next victim? We’re afraid for our lives!” 

“Then stay here.” He said matter-of-factly. “Or go home. Tell your village not to leave their homes after nightfall. If we left now or later, we’d not reach Mulbrydale before daybreak. There’ll be no monster to find.” 

They agreed on a price and the three Mulbrydalers slunk away into the evening. 

“Huh.” Luchezara planted her hands on her hips.

“What?”

“You’ve really started laying down boundaries between you and demanding humans.” 

He shrugged and threw the bag of daggers over his shoulder and yawned. “I’m tired. Come on. Let’s get some sleep before someone else decides to bother me.” He slouched towards the inn, and she loped after him, tripping every once in a while in her split hose. Ah well-- spring was fading into summer, after all. 

“By someone else ‘bothering you,’ you mean me, kicking you in my sleep?”

“I like it. It’s like a massage. But from an angry cat.” 

“Hah. You really do love me.” 

* * *

The next morning they woke up tangled up in one another. They rose in groggy silence, washed together, and took to their daily rituals which made them less monstrous, more approachable. She pulled the knots that had formed overnight out of her thick, wooly hair and tied up the dull blonde locks with vibrant ribbon and gold chains. He took his morning shots of pain-numbing liquor while she put on the rest of her jewelry and fastened her dress with an easily releasable knot. She helped him shave along the troubled topography of his face. They smiled at the innkeeper who was all too ready to be rid of the sight of a Witcher and whatever he was standing next to, and took water and bread with cheese for the road. When they were already on horseback, Eskel took the notices pinned to the public newsboard and shuffled through them as they set off on the road. 

“Sheep thief...Missing dog…” He murmured, passing each over to her. “Bandit problem… bandit _recruitment_ pamphlet… _Melitele…_ ” 

“Those Mulbrydale people didn’t even have time to write a contract, it happened so suddenly.”

He clicked his tongue and squinted his eyes against the rising sun. “Dunno if I believe that. A curse always has an origin. In Velen they’re all just buried very deep.” 

They arrived in Mulbrydale just before the sun set. The villagers didn’t ask too many questions-- it was clear the tall one was a witcher. The other one would just be gone with him by the next morning. The homes that ringed the village boundaries were well-kept and brightly painted. Their newly-planted fields were the color of fertile black earth. Their children were all well-fed, and curious. Their parents held them back from running from the home while they themselves peeked nervously at the Witcher and his assistant from behind their doorways. Many children, and the parents were fresh-faced as well. There were nearly no elderly in sight. It was strange in Velen to not see a few cantankerous old survivors of the rough life.

“You don’t live like everyone else in Velen.” Eskel said. “Why is that?” 

“We’ve been living well for nigh on fifty years.” The man they met the day before explained as he led them around the village. “Before that--legend has it-- this area was wreaked by an unknown pestilence.” 

“That’s why there are only two generations living here.”

“Yes.”

“What ended it?” Luchezara asked, as Eskel suddenly turned towards a carved wooden statue in the middle of the provincial square. He closed his fingers around his medallion. 

“Well…” The villager pulled at his collar nervously. “We started praying to the Crones… still _do_ , in fact… We leave offerings to the shrine, there.” 

“The crones should be gone,” She repeated what Eskel had told her, and what she hoped was true. 

The man shrugged wearily. “So it’s said. And yet, we still stood to benefit, until now. Perhaps if they were truly still looking after Velen, we wouldn’t have any dead in the night.” 

“Wishful thinking.” Eskel said grimly.

“We know the crones require sacrifice. Don’t think we’re all fools, here. The voluntary pain is always better than the alternative.” Luchezara noticed he was missing two fingers on his right hand. 

“That reminds me-- where’s your dead?” 

They followed him behind one of the homes where they had laid the corpse on a bench. He pulled away the sheet over the small body. It was a child. Dead only for a day, but already rotting. His skin was sallow, almost green, and covered in wet boils; flies danced around his gaping mouth, an eternal scream. Maggots pulsed under his eyelids. Luchezara turned around immediately having received a vision of his last moments behind her eyes after looking into his lightless sockets. A haunting shriek, and a feeling of abject terror and the acidic and sweet taste of rot in the back of her throat. There was no way for her to make sense of it.

Eskel didn’t need to ask her what she saw, in any case. “Plague maiden.” He decided, easily. 

“That’s just legends.” The man said in a hushed tone. 

Luchezara remembered its entry from the Witchers’ bestiary. A malevolent spirit that accompanied a pestilence. “Why now? There hasn’t been a plague here for fifty years.” 

“Go back to your home.” Eskel said to the man, who happily did as he was told. Eskel led Luchezara away from the boy’s body and back to the square. “It’s that fucking statue.” He whispered to her with frustration. “In praying to the crones, these fools have been somehow raising a pesta. If I can’t stop it, it’ll bring a new pestilence before too long.” 

The statue looked like almost any other roadside shrine to a minor goddess in Velen. Wildflowers flourished around it; candles were lit at its base. Its pose, however, was unique. It was the body of a nude young woman cowering. Her wooden hands covered her face and curled in like claws. 

“ _Eskel.”_ Luchezara breathed in sharply and gestured to the base. What she had thought were wind-fallen candles were pale, wrinkled severed fingers. Some had been there so long that they were nothing more than sun-bleached bone. 

Such horrors were old hat to him. “Are you alright? Maybe you should go and sit in one of the houses...”

She swallowed hard and shook her head, but took a deep breath before answering him. “I’m fine…”

His mind wandered aloud. “I don’t understand… My medallion is rattling like crazy over this shrine. But there’s no clues as to why.”

“Except for an event that happened half a century ago.” 

“Is something inside...?” He pulled at one of the wooden hands gingerly. “But that wouldn’t make any sense, why _now--_ ” 

The hand broke off in his. They watched as the wood grain shifted before their eyes into the lifeless wrinkles of a mummified human hand. He let it fall to the ground and watched the rest of the rest of the statue crack, releasing an unearthly shriek, and transform. 

“Luchezara, _I want you to run_.” He ordered. She’d never heard such an edge in his voice. 

She wouldn’t. “I have to see it.” To become it, to understand the mystery, she had to know it.

“It isn’t worth your life--”

“I have to try!” She shouted over another foul shriek. 

The creature broke free of the shrine’s base. It’s body was emaciated, green, and full of boils and fetid ulcers. It’s tongue lolled over its hanging jawbone held on to the skull by threads of skin. He drew his sword and tried to shove her away. It wasn’t far enough. The movement attracted the thing, and it sprung on her. She screamed and held it back as it clawed at her skin with its remaining arm and dripped noxious fluid over her face. It burned.

She begged for help, but panic paralyzed him. There was no way he could chance using a sign that would injure her. Sending his silver sword through its back would kill her, too. Too long in a disease susceptible body could leave her vulnerable to its permeating disease. 

Her screams were muffled by the pesta’s tongue twisting over her face and throat. His heart thundered in his ears. With no other option, he threw a bomb nearby-- enough to get its attention. 

The pesta’s eyes were hollow and endless, full of the sorrow and bitter anger of fifty years’ captivity. It overwhelmed her mind. Luchezara could barely think; it was all she could do to keep breathing the air of its putrid breath. She heard the bomb go off, and the pressure of the beast’s tongue on her cheek pressed her head to the ground, where she saw it lock barren eye sockets with him on the other side of the square. One single thought came into her head: there was no way she would allow it to get to him. Instinct took over; her teeth lengthened to fangs and sharp canines, and her face stretched into a hirsute snout to accommodate them. She remembered the werewolf and her fear of hurting those she loved. Her own werewolf body ripped itself out of her dress. She caught the pesta’s tongue between her teeth and wrenched back, rending it from the skull. Her face was bathed in its rotten black blood. It poured into her mouth and burned her throat. 

The thing cried out and reeled back. She made it to her knees and spit the tongue out. It cowered for a moment at the loss, but shrieked as fiercely as before, spraying the tar black mess over the grass. She roared back. Before she could leap on it, however, its head was lopped off mid-scream. It dissolved into a pitiful pile of dust before Eskel. They stood there for a moment in breathy silence. He watched the black bile drip from his blade. She returned, sobbing, to her own shaking, trembling, nude body. It was a horror she had never seen before, and one she hoped desperately to forget.

He watched her spit tar into the grass. “You need to vomit.” He ordered in a trembling voice. “If you’ve swallowed any of it and it doesn’t come up, it may kill you.”

But she couldn’t process a thing he was saying beyond the noise in her ears from the plague maiden’s cries. Like the buzz of hornets emerging from a corpse. So he hoisted her up himself and thrust his fingers down her throat. She collapsed again into the grass and vomited ink. 

The villagers came out to see what had happened. Eskel draped her in his jacket and held her against him tightly while she sobbed. Just like he and Geralt had done for one another as children when they had killed their first monster together. 

The people saw their shrine destroyed, and their “goddess” in a pile in the dirt. Next to it was the wolf woman who had ripped her apart, and the Witcher with a wolf medallion. One by one, the shocked villagers, having lived by their own superstitions for the better part of a century, fell on their knees in front of them. 

“We angered the crones,” A woman cried out. “We angered the crones and they sent a pesta against us… The wolf goddess and her Witcher acolyte have saved us…!”

Eskel’s jaw dropped. “...What….?”

“Look upon us, goddess…!”

Luchezara stopped shaking, and turned her head to view the crowd over the stiff high collar of Eskel’s armored jacket. 

“Forgive us…! We knew not what you were…!”

“Speak to us…!” 

She wiped her nose clean of snot and sick with her palm. “I….” They waited with bated breath. “I want to go inside…” She murmured. “I want to take a bath…” 

* * *

Once both of those wishes were fulfilled, they both got their wits about them again. He berated her for not running, and then he sobbed. Then he held her so tightly she felt like she would snap in half, and he told her how brilliant her defense had been. He kissed her as if he was attempting to ascertain that all of her pieces were still there. She told him that her instinct had kicked in because of him; that if that _thing_ had touched him, she’d never have forgiven herself. He berated her again, this time sweetly, tenderly, gratefully, for forgetting that he was a Witcher. 

“Well… now you’re the acolyte of the wolf goddess…” 

He snorted. “Dunno how we’ll sort _this_ out.”

“I looked into that thing’s eyes…” She replied somberly. “I can tell them what happened.”

The village had gathered again near the house where they cleaned themselves up. She told them what she’d seen in the vacant eye sockets of the pesta. Fifty years before, the villagers had offered up a sacrifice for the crones to stop the plague. They chose a young, beautiful woman. They trapped her in the shrine and fed off her youth and their corporal offerings. There, trapped in the wood for decades, she watched the decades go by, aged, and eventually died, still trapped. Her wronged spirit, full of plague and bitterness, was all that remained. It was when she died that the spirit was able to leave the shrine and hunt the villagers in the night. Breaking the shrine had released it for good. And now it was dead. There was never a goddess. The crones took advantage of their fear. And now they were gone, too. Luchezara explained that she was “just” a doppler, a creature that hadn’t been seen for so long in any place but Novigrad that like plague maidens, it too had become a legend in rural Velen. 

They gave the pesta’s ashes a proper burial. The villagers still insisted on celebrating the event, goddess or not, with a small festival. It was the most positive reception she or Eskel had ever gotten in Velen-- how could they say no?

They lit a grand bonfire where they burned the rest of the shrine. Over the bonfire they roasted lamb and several geese. Eskel and Luchezara wanted and did nothing more that night than to down as much alcohol as possible to forget all they had just seen. With the reign of wooden idols over, the villagers had returned to nature worship, something of which the old “wolf goddess” greatly approved. They passed around furred leather animal masks. He lifted his to take a swig of something strong and clear that they had been passing between them. They were sitting on a log bench in front of the fire. “Didn’t like being a goddess?”

She watched the villagers dance together around the fire with half closed eyes. “In case you weren’t aware,” She slurred lazily. “Dopplers generally don’t like to be the center of attention… it invites, uh… what would you call it…. Suspicion. ‘Sides… you and I both know I don’t have the body to be a voluptuous, fertile nature goddess.” She waved her hands in front of her in unison, making wide sloping lines in the air. “You do, though.” 

He cackled. 

“I’m not joking…” She hiccuped, and slapped his chest. She gripped his shirt and some of his chest hair with it. He stared at her as if she was about to reveal a state secret, although both struggled to focus their gaze. His pupils continually dilated and contracted, and she became distracted by their movement. “Eskel… you are the most beautiful man I’ve ever been with…”

“How… how many men have you been with…?” It didn’t concern him. He was just curious to know how proud he should be. 

She got incredibly close to his face. “...Three…” She enunciated, nearly into his mouth. Their noses were pressed together. 

“Thass… not _a lot_ …” He slurred, but she had moved on to biting his lip. They crushed their lips together, and then their bodies. 

Luchezara pulled away. “No, we can’t… we can’t… I want to but I can’t… I can’t feel my hands…” She waved them around again to show how uncoordinated she was. 

“Go eat something, Looch…” He mumbled, pressing the cold bottle to his face. “Get me something, too… huh… can’t feel my legs… I think i’m gonna… get on the ground…” 

She wobbled her way up and stumbled off. “Good luck… Be careful… I love you…”

She wandered around the fire, seeing double of everything and everyone. She had enough wherewithal to smile when smiled at. When she finally had the gathering of food in her sights, she dragged herself towards it at what must have been a comically slow speed. Before she could reach it, however, she stumbled into another body. 

“Oh-- sorry, I…”

“Oh, my dear…!” It was an old woman’s voice. 

Luchezara blinked, but couldn’t get the woman’s face in focus, even when everything behind her was. She saw only the shape of gray hair, a gaunt face, and warm hands that closed over her own.

“It’s my fault my dear… my goodness… you can barely stand…! You must have had quite the night…” The old woman pressed a hand to her shoulder and began to lead her away. 

“Where’s the food…?”

“Oh, don’t worry about the food… come with me, let’s get you sorted out, first…”

Her head lolled back and forth. Between deep blinks, she registered that she was being led into the trees. “Nn… wai….wait... My Eskel… he’s over there… he’s on the ground…” 

“I’m sure he’ll be fine… it’s a very stable place to be.” 

They stopped, surrounded by trees. 

“Now, my dear, I need you to listen to me.” 

“Hnn…?” 

The woman’s features began to shift grotesquely. Her back hunched. She wore a peaked cap, and under it a bloodied eye patch. Her other eyelid was swollen over and covered in holes. Luchezara heard the buzzing of flies. The sound of hornets. They were crawling in and out of the abcesses. The woman’s voice took on a poisonous tone. 

“ _Velen belongs to the Weavess, not to pathetic rats like you.”_

She remembered something in the fog. Mulbrydale had no elderly. 

Except, perhaps, for one surviving crone.

The crone yanked at her hair and pulled one of her braids apart. 

“ _Leave Velen, or die.”_

Luchezara heard the silvery sound of sharp scissors slicing through hair, and then felt a sharp hit of pain. She cried out. The crone laughed. The Weavess had attempted to cut her hair to use for a curse. She didn’t realize that Doppler’s hair was an illusion. It turned into cartilage in her gnarled hand. The bottom of Luchezara’s braid looked as if it had been soaked in blood. 

“Well, well.” The Weavess muttered. She crunched the piece of skin between her gnarled teeth, and swallowed it. Luchezara clutched her braid and stumbled back into the trunk of a tree. “If you’re going to be a difficult little _rat_ , I don’t need anything from _you.”_ Cackling erupted through her thin lips. She looked out through the trees, and Luchezara’s eyes followed. 

“We can both _pretend_ , you see… but I can be in two places at once…” 

Through the trees, Luchezara saw a figure bent over Eskel, prostrate and nearly unconscious on the grass. The figure pulled at his hair, and sliced a lock away. It turned back and smiled at Luchezara with her own uncanny face. 

“No… No…! You can’t do this…!”

The Weavess cackled again. “You see how it feels, bitch, to have a double…?”

“ _Eskel…!!!!”_

Boney fingers clasped her mouth shut. The Weavess crept closer. Luchezara could feel the wings of flies and hornets brush her cheeks. 

“ _LEAVE VELEN, LITTLE BITCH, OR IT’S HIS LIFE._ ” She screamed. Luchezara could swear she heard three voices. The last thing she felt was the back of her head slamming into the tree trunk. She crumpled into darkness. 

The sun and the sound of buzzing near her ear woke her with a start the next morning. She was back in the clearing. She scrambled to her feet. “Eskel…!” He was so close that she nearly tripped over his body, splayed out over the grass. She waited one tense moment until she watched his chest rise and fall. He was alive. 

Was it a dream?

She shook him and tapped his face urgently. “Eskel…?!” 

His eyes fluttered open, but upon meeting the sun they shut again violently. “Ach….!” He lifted himself up onto his elbows. “Fuck…” he muttered. “Did I sleep out here…? My head is pounding…” 

So was the back of hers. She brought a shaking hand to it. 

He noticed her frantic worry. “What’s wrong…?”

She grasped his face, making sure he was real, that he was all there. “Nothing, I…. I think I had a bad dream, after all that yesterday…” 

“It happens…” He mumbled, sitting up fully. “You didn’t drink enough…”

“I think it was too much, actually.”

“Well…?” He took a deep breath of fresh air. It looked like it made him feel sick. He squinted at her. “A meal, and then back on the road? We can take care of those bandits. Maybe find that missing dog...”

“Sure…” She answered, and helped him get up. “Come on, old man… You look worse than usual...”

“I _feel_ worse than usual,” he responded. Upon being righted, his stomach lurched in protest. He pushed her away and vomited near the ashes of the bonfire. He didn’t bother or want to look at it. He wiped his mouth. “Let’s get going, then…” 

She watched him walk away. In the puddle of his sick she found one single, writhing hornet. One of her braids was loose, its clipped tip soaked in red. 


	4. Cursed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The curses they’d encountered in-between brushes with Velen’s monstrous megafauna were sometimes, like the shrine of Mulbrydale, generations old. They were broken in an instant, but they often had no idea how they first began to manifest-- was it a cataclysm, or did it begin as mundane as a sneeze? It made the early signs of Eskel’s own curse hardly perceptible. In critical moments-- the swipe of a water hag, the grasping of a leshen-- he slowed, and suffered for it. In the aftermath when she would patch him up, he would only say that he was tired. She knew that could not have been true. He slept like a stone, and she knew because she spent most of the night awake. But how was a Witcher supposed to tell a new, urgent pain from all of the everyday pains he drowned out with liquor and poisons?

Eskel slunk himself up to the Mulbrydale tavern bar with half-closed eyes and a pained expression. “Water please…. Two of whatever you have that’s full of salt.” After a moment, he amended his order. “And several shots of whatever you have under the counter that’s strong.” 

He had to lean on Luchezara on their way to a table. She was agitated, and fully of worry; her body felt like it was spring loaded. He sat on a bench, but decided even that was too much, and laid back on it. “I could say this is the most hungover I’ve ever been…” He muttered, “But I’ve been in this situation too many times…” 

Normally she would have laughed, but she was silent. She chewed on her lip, fidgeted with her hands, and craned her neck to peer at him without looking conspicuously worried. Her eyes wouldn’t focus well in the dark tavern. She was desperately trying to see whether anything fundamental about him had changed. When their food was brought out, some kind of savory oats, her view of him was obscured. Upon smelling the alcohol, however, he climbed his way back to a sitting position, gripping the side of the table with white knuckles.

She stared into the bowl of beige-- after their exploit, the innkeeper was kind enough to respect her refusal to eat meat, but that didn’t mean what she got in return was in any way skillfully made-- and began, haltingly, “Eskel-- I… I have to--”

He held up a hand, unable to handle conversation until the burn of the shots refired the engines of his body. He smelled them, retched, but nonetheless blew a puff of air out of his mouth and took down all three in quick succession. He pressed his head into his hands and seemed to struggle to keep the liquid down for a moment. After a final, pent-up exhale, he revealed his palm-reddened face again and started to eat. 

He peered at her curiously. “What’s with you, today? Usually I’m the one that has to carry  _ you _ around after a night like that. You look like a deer that realized it’s in a wolf’s sights.” 

“I’m worried about something.” She blurted out. 

“As in?”

She wrung her fingers together and craned her neck from side to side, as if attempting to see behind his head. “Did… Did you notice that someone cut a piece of your hair? Did they look like me?”

He snorted and continued to dig around in his bowl. “What are you talking about? You  _ do _ cut my hair.”

“No…  _ yesterday. Last night.”  _

Eskel narrowed his eyes, but patted around his head to humor her. She did look worried, after all. But he’d experienced many a hangover during which he felt an unexplained sense of dread and impending doom, only to later realize that all he really needed was to vomit. “It doesn’t seem like it. But I wouldn’t be able to tell if anyone had. ...Why?” 

She wrapped her fingers around the dried red end of one of her braids. She still remembered the sounds of the Weavess’ scissors. 

“I told you that I had a nightmare. That’s what I thought, at first. But I think it was real. The last crone… the Weavess… She led me into the wood and she told me that if we don’t leave Velen, we’ll die.”

He shook his head and spoke past a mouthful of food. “Nightmare. Caused by these superstitious villagers and alcohol.”

“You can’t know that.”

“You were with me the whole night.”

She shook her head back. “Not when I left to get something to eat.” 

He began to get worried that her fear wasn’t yet assuaged. “ _ No… _ but you came back.”

Luchezara fixed him with the most fearful, forlorn expression and again shook her head slowly. 

His voice faltered. “Yes… yes you did… you… I remember… you were all over me, but all I wanted to do was sleep.”

Her voice was quiet, and trembling. “That wasn’t me. I was watching you through the trees. That was  _ her... _ The Weavess. She was there, and she took your hair.” She unclenched her fist around her shortened braid and showed him its scarred edges. “She tried to take it from me, but my hair doesn’t grow. It’s… not hair. When it’s cut, it just turns back into tissue… She swallowed it. And she took yours instead.”

He struggled to absorb it all, pinching the bridge of his nose under a deeply furrowed brow. The braid was difficult evidence to refute. “Looch, this is… this is  _ nonsense… _ ” 

“The women from Downwarren told me months ago the crones use hair for curses…!” She pulled at his arm, forcing him to meet her eyes. “Eskel, I’m  _ begging  _ you to listen to me!”

He became quiet. “I believe you,” He said, measuredly, after a tense moment of silence. He pushed his bowl away. Hers was still untouched. “But I also believe that without the other two crones, the Weavess is no more dangerous than your everyday water hag.” He took her hands in his; they were stiff and unyielding. “What… you mean you’re really considering leaving Velen? This is what you wanted… this… this was the start of our life’s work! Because of a  _ threat _ ? For all we know, it doesn’t even have teeth…!” 

“I don’t want to leave Velen because of a threat.” She said softly. There was a timidity in her tone that he hadn’t heard since Novigrad, when she was living under the thumb of the witch hunters. He hated hearing it. “I want to leave Velen because I don’t want you to die.” 

He squeezed her palms over the table. “Look at me… hey-- we stay in Velen. And we deal with this  _ if _ we need to. I’m a Witcher, right? Sometimes I think you forget that. And we witchers... “ He laughed slightly, and a bit bitterly. “For whatever reason or another, the gods don’t want to let us die--” 

Her expression broke, and her lower lip trembled. She withdrew her hands and threw them up to her face. 

“No, that’s not… I was just joking--” 

And she started weeping. “Why would you joke about that to me….?!” 

He cast nervous smiles across the tavern to assure everyone she was just fine. After all, less than a day ago they had been convinced for some minutes that she was a nature goddess. 

“Looch, look at me…” She parted her fingers over her face. He could just see slivers of opaque grey irises looking back. “We stay. The best case scenario is that these threats are the last attempts by some powerless thing to lay claim to Velen. And the worst case?” He shrugged. “The worst case is that I just  _ do my job _ and we  _ take care of it. _ Okay?” 

“...Okay….” She sniffed, and lowered her hands. “Promise?” 

“I swear it on my life.”

“ _ Eskel!”  _

“Ha… well, will you eat, please? Once the fear leaves you, you’re going to realize that you’re hungover.” 

\----------------

They both recovered from that night of revelry within the next two days, and she was grateful he never mentioned her paranoia. She did, however, continue to look behind and to all sides while they were on the road-- for what, she wasn’t sure. What could a curse look like? At night, Luchezara didn’t sleep. She clung to him when they camped for the night as if dark hands were going to break the ground below them and pull him under. If he noticed, he didn’t say anything, save for an occasional half-asleep “lay off” when her hands like claws gripped his chest. 

They went about their usual work, monsters, bandits, and even some curses. She learned how to shapeshift into a griffon for mere moments in order to force a young female from roosting near a village. One didn’t need to kill monsters always. Sometimes, she noted to Eskel, prideful and breathless after the exhausting transformation, one just needed to know the right kind of body language. 

The curses they’d encountered in-between brushes with Velen’s monstrous megafauna were sometimes, like the shrine of Mulbrydale, generations old. They were broken in an instant, but they often had no idea how they first began to manifest-- was it a cataclysm, or did it begin as mundane as a sneeze? It made the early signs of Eskel’s own curse hardly perceptible. In critical moments-- the swipe of a water hag, the grasping of a leshen-- he slowed, and suffered for it. In the aftermath when she would patch him up, he would only say that he was tired. She knew that could not have been true; he slept like a stone, and she knew because she spent most of the night awake. But how was a Witcher supposed to tell a new, urgent pain from all of the everyday pains he drowned out with liquor and poisons? 

Eskel developed a cough-- “its sleeping rough, it’s cold in Velen at night,”-- which became, in two weeks time, a laborious wheeze. It produced a dark fluid, a muck, which he would spit on the ground before rinsing out his mouth with a gulp of white gull. He became difficult to rouse in the morning, and agitated during the day. He maintained a constant level of slight drunkenness to quiet a churning pain in his gut from which more pitch phlegm flowed by the day. 

They were nearing the village of Lurtch that evening when she broke their silence on the curse again. She walked with Eel in tow, while he could barely stay upright on Scorpion. 

“All I need is a healer… I’ve taken too many hits lately.” He muttered under hot, pained breaths. 

She looked back at him ruefully. “Because it’s the curse making you slow. It’s the curse making you wheeze, and it’s the curse, that--”

“ _ Enough about the fucking  _ curse!” He snapped. She and the horses stopped in their tracks. Crows took flight from nearby hanging trees at the sound. He had never shouted at her like that. Her lips twisted into a thin, hard, bitter line. She had shouted at him before, but it had never been  _ at _ him-- she had argued passionately at him at Kaer Morhen about the place of man in a world full of monsters, but it had only ever been about the Witcher profession. She had never raised her voice to him personally. “You’re skittish. And you’ve been scared. But you don’t know what you’re talking about,” He said, gentler. His eyes pleaded with her forgiveness, but his face twisted again from pain. 

Her voice was hard-edged, and quiet. “I saw her curse you. I saw it, even if I do not know its nature. And I watch you every day. I watch you as you sleep-- I can’t sleep for my fear, Eskel.  _ For you. _ You want to turn a blind eye to it-- is it easier, to drink oneself stupid? And then accuse the one who loves you of not being  _ aware? _ ” 

Eskel didn’t answer. He was doubled over, leaning on Scorpion’s neck. She climbed on to her own saddle and clicked her tongue, sending both horses forward towards the village. 

She rented a room for them at the tavern in Lurtch. It was a grim place, judging by how full, but silent the tavern was. When armies marched on, many villages in their wake were left without an army’s income for their blacksmiths, crops, coopers,tanners, and messengers. She helped him to their room, a six by three cubit box just large enough for a bed, and too cramped for the tension between them. Luchezara wanted to go right to sleep. She had no appetite, and Eskel had stopped being able to keep any food down a day past. 

She helped him with his boots and jacket and tucked him under the thin, ratty sheets wordlessly before doing the same for herself, stripping down to her chemise and getting into bed. Her back was to him. “I… I’m sorry…” He said towards it. “It’s the pain… and the worry. Whether you’re right or wrong… I… like this, I can’t protect you.” 

“And you shun me, and yell when I try to do the same for you.” She muttered to the wall. She hugged her knees to her chest. He worried about this threat making her timid like she had been in Novigrad. She worried the same, but not about the fear. In Novigrad, the people who cared for her treated her as if her inexperience with humanity made her naive, incapable, and unaware. She had to be told what to do, and how to do it, or it would be a shame, because she would not last in the world, Dijkstra said. He said she was a powerful little thing, but without direction she was nothing more than a sweet novelty. Her escape from the poacher, flight to Kaer Morhen, and exploits in Velen proved that she was capable of acts more marvelous and more depraved than she could have ever imagined under Sigi’s supervision. Perhaps Eskel thought her plenty capable, as long as he was around to make sure she didn’t make a mistake. “Tomorrow I’m going to search for the end to this curse, or whatever it is you’d prefer to name it.” She just barely turned her head to him, voice thick with emotion, before burying it into a nearly empty down pillow. “Until it’s lifted, I’d prefer not to talk to you.” 

She would get her wish. The sharp light of the morning piercing tattered curtains couldn’t rouse him, and neither did her voice. Luchezara screamed for him to wake, and then screamed for anyone to help. Dark phlegm dripped from one corner of his mouth. As the tavern keeper and the men who had drunk until daylight carried him outside and laid him on an empty goods cart, she captured some of the liquid into a vial she kept in her pack for collecting monster matter. 

She hooked Scorpion and Eel to the cart and jumped on to Eel’s saddle. The men told her where she would find the nearest healer, but she wasn’t headed that way. Someone in Downwarren would know the secrets of a Crones’ curse. He was still breathing, slowly, for now. She only hoped he would stay alive the time it would take to get there. The horses set off as quickly as they could go without the cart jostling him too much or making the wheels split or spin off. 

Once they were away from the small crowd of Lurtch, it was just Luchezara, the wood, and Eskel’s unconsciousness. Normally, by the time they’d mounted their horses she’d already be talking to him about one thing or another, frivolous or serious. Whether goats recognized that they were goats (he believed so, if only because they seemed to recognize what  _ wasn’t  _ a goat). Where was the furthest place he had been on the continent, and what he thought was beyond it (a sea monster of unfathomable size that he would like to see one day). What they would be doing at that moment, had they not met each other (alone, he’d say, haunting somewhere that didn’t want him in search of contracts, spending nights with prostitutes who were overly kind to him to the point of pity). Now it was just her and the sounds of the wood. Choruses of crows gossiped to one another on boughs above them along the rugged merchants’ pass on which she drove. She didn’t stop to sleep, only once every few hours to make sure he was still alive, to prop him up and give him water when she could, and to plead for him to recognize her voice and wake. At twilight, half of the way to Downwarren, she sat behind him in the cart and held his head in her lap. She dabbed sweat from his forehead with one end of her sleeve. His brow was knotted and his mouth was tight and drawn. So there was still pain, constant pain. 

“I’m sorry…” She pressed her cheek to his forehead and whispered. “I know you didn’t mean it… you were scared... “ She waited, understanding that he wouldn’t speak, but desperately wanting to hear his voice. She settled gratefully for his tense, slow breathing. “When you wake up, you’ll apologize to me again, and I’ll pretend that it was ever necessary because I know you’ll hold me especially close, like you do... “ Her voice lowered, and she settled for a poor imitation of his voice in her own. “ _ ‘It’s the mutations, Looch. I can’t always express myself the way I’d like to’… _ ha, right…” The night was getting cold, but she had to move on. She reached for a blanket out of one of his saddlebags and draped it over him before gently stepping away from him to start riding again. Over the rattling of the wheels of the cart over rocks and horse noise, she could still hear crows. It was strange, she thought, as crows weren’t nocturnal. 

They reached Downwarren in the early morning. Many were already out and about tending crops and feeding livestock and the goats they had been gifted by Eskel. They initially greeted her with happiness, with smiles, until they saw her exhausted, ragged expression, and that Eskel’s body was in the cart. She jumped from her horse and caught one of the women tightly by her arm. She remembered her face; the woman had taught her to embroider, where to find edible plants in the swamp, and the secrets to a decades-long marriage. As soon as the word  _ curse _ left Luchezara’s lips, however, the woman ripped herself away and fled into her home. The quick disappearance of the rest of the village was noted only by the noise of their doors and shutters slamming shut. 

In the middle of the village there was something that had not been there during the months she and Eskel had lived there. It was a shrine. She left the cart to get close, feeling her breath catch in her chest. It was a carving of a nude young girl, cowering in sorrow. At its base were candles dripping wax, and severed ears dripping blood. Just like the shrine to the crones in Mulbrydale. 

Luchezara sobbed in fear, in anguish, and anger. “What have you people  _ done…?!”  _ She wailed towards the cluster of shuttered homes. She recognized the statue as the encased body of one of Downwarren’s orphans. Sacrificed, but living. She would age and die as a votive offering in the middle of the village, in service to a profiteering being who pretended for godhood. All of her work, all of Eskel’s efforts were wiped away from the place. Fear ruled again, and would rule, until the Weavess inevitably let more death loose. She fell to her knees and wept, loudly, for Eskel, nearly lifeless in the cart, for the help she could not find, for that familiar feeling of helplessness which had seemingly found her after Novigrad, and for the trapped young girl who would have wept the same, if she could have made any noise at all from her silent wooden scream.  __

“Luchezara…?” 

It was a small voice, from further away. A familiar voice. She turned. A familiar face-- large eyes, gray-indigo cheeks, and a nest of light reddish hair. 

“Johnny…!” she cried out, but had no strength to stand until he propelled himself into her arms. His momentum knocked some life back into her as she stood to swing him around in her arms.

“Slow down, you’re gonna break my ribs…!” He squeaked until she let his feet back on the ground. “You really got strong by all these months out here monstering… you see, I call it  _ monstering  _ rather than  _ witchering… _ because you’re a monster, of course. You can use that, if you want.”

She sobbed pitifully, grateful at least to see one friendly face. “Johnny… what happened here?” 

But like the other residents of Downwarren, he was less than ready to be forthright with information. “But of course,” he continued, tapping his chin and not meeting her gaze. “I suppose that’d make you a monster _ er… _ and that doesn’t sound very catchy. But you certainly don’t  _ witch--” _

“ _ Johnny…!”  _

“It’s a verbal conundrum, if I ever heard of one.” He gestured to the severed ears on the shrine with his head, took her hand, and led them away from their ‘earshot’ and towards the horses. He scanned the sky for crows. “What does it look like happened here, Loochie?” He whispered to her fearfully from behind the cart. “ _ She  _ came back.. She came back to set them straight… and the Weavess is set to kill me if I go against her…” He looked forlornly towards the shrine that trapped the body of one of his former playmates. “Can you help me…?”

Luchezara laughed, crazed, incredulous at the circumstances. “I came here to  _ get  _ help… your help, if it’s all that’s left for me…”

“What do you mean…?” He asked with trepidation, noticing for the first time that for once she wasn’t accompanied by her witcher the size of a wall. “Where’s your goat man…?”

She gripped the side of the cart and swallowed as if she was sickened to be reminded of what lay inside. He travelled to the back of the cart to look, then immediately backed away. He looked terrified. “No… no… no, I can’t help you. I want to, but I can’t help you.”

She fell to her knees again and gripped his shoulders. “You know what it is…?! You know the curse! You can help me, help  _ him _ ! You can!”

He shook his head wildly. “What part of ‘the Weavess said she’d kill me’ don’t you understand?! And I don’t know the first thing about breaking a curse…  _ honest!  _ It was a  _ witcher _ that helped me when last the crones cursed me! They… they curse for nothing at all! For fun! And they’ll kill for nothing!” 

Her shoulders slumped. She looked dazed from helplessness. It was hopelessness. Eskel was living on borrowed time, and she felt she had been wasting it. But gears were turning in Johnny’s mind. He was realizing that by being near her and the cursed body of Eskel, he had become a part of it all. He couldn’t be alone in Downwarren now, at the mercy of the Weavess, or any of her minions that he had previously learned to call neighbors. 

“I know someone who may be able to help you…  _ us.” _ He spoke up after a moment. “The pellar. He lives nearby, maybe two hours westward. He’s a healer, and knows a lot about a lot more, besides. He tried to save someone I cared about from the crones, once.”

She wiped the sorrow from her nose with a sleeve. “Did he succeed?”

Johnny didn’t answer and only climbed onto the back of the cart with Eskel. 

“Johnny!”

“What are you waiting for?” He shouted from the cart. “We’re wasting daylight, I don’t know how to drive horses, and our goat man can’t, on account of him being incapacitated, currently. We’ve got a curse to break, and the pellar is hours away!”

She let out a half-sob, half-laugh at the first crumbs of hope she’d felt in weeks, and jumped into the saddle. 


	5. Crookback Bog

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Luchezara transforms into Eskel to kill the final Crone of Crookback Bog and save the Witcher's life. In doing , she taps into those memories and experiences he'd been reluctant to share with her.
> 
> "She felt Geralt’s embrace. One time, a hundred times. Deeper and tighter every year. 
> 
> Eskel’s fear of heights. The view of the first steep drop off from the Killer. A boy’s terrified gasps for breath. Luchezara peered over the edge with Eskel’s mind’s eye. The bottom of the cliff stretched away, uncannily. His eyes remained focused on another boy’s broken body in a puddle of deep red at its surging end. His friend Oleg. They shared a kiss once. And then he was dead. Eskel! It was Geralt again. The memory swirled and churned with his memory of the trials. I’ll get a running start and jump to the other side. Then when you jump I’ll catch you. Love and fear. Don’t look down. Geralt on the other side of the cliff. Geralt on another wooden slab. Geralt, who caught Eskel’s wrists before he fell. Eskel, who rattled against the restraints over his wrists, who screamed as hoarsely as he could after the seizures and the sick. Eskel, who still couldn’t stop them from taking Geralt away for more torture."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you liked it, let me know! :') This chapter was a long time in coming. Shout out to the bear from Annihilation (2018).

The pellar was an elderly man, timid, but with a quiet nobility owing to his knowledge and the deep responsibility he took in applying it. He had a laurel wreath of white hair around his head and a string of chickens’ feet around his neck. He spoke to Luchezara and Johnny with a steadying softness that calmed both creatures, even when the information wasn’t much help. 

They stood outside his small cottage in the middle of the forest. Even with the strength of all three of them, they would not have been able to lift Eskel from the cart inside. The pellar examined the bottle of black pitch Luchezara had collected. “I am barely a healer, little ones, but your Witcher needs more than any healer can provide.” The pellar’s goat, Princess, gummed the edges of Eskel’s boots as they hung from the back of the cart. “I can lessen the physical pain,” He passed the vial back to Luchezara, “but if I am as familiar with the curse as I believe I am, as long as he is in its thrall, he will not wake.” 

“You’re familiar…?” Luchezara probed desperately. “That means you can help him. Like you helped Johnny’s friend.” 

Johnny’s voice was low and quiet. He stared at the ground and kicked at the dirt. “Anna. He couldn’t help her. Nobody could. But he was the first one who tried.” 

“Once the Ladies of the Wood have their claws in a man, they are loath to let them go. Even after they are dead.” The pellar added somberly. “The Ladies feast on flesh and then collect the soul inside. If your Witcher died, I would perhaps be able to free his spirit. But he is yet alive, and should remain so.”

Johnny slid his hand into Luchezara’s palm. She squeezed it. “I would be grateful if… if you could help him, however you can.” 

The pellar nodded, and retreated into his home for a few moments. 

Johnny pushed himself up to sit on the back of the cart so that he and Luchezara were almost eye-to-eye. Her eyes were blank and despondent. But it seemed that behind the eyes of the girl  _ he _ knew the mills of her mind were turning. “If there’s anyone who can fix this, Loochie, it’s you.”

She didn’t even laugh bitterly. Luchezara was silent, bitterly. They both turned their heads to the sound of a group of crows. Luchezara pushed herself away from the cart, loped to a nearby tree, jumped upon and hung on to one of its lower, thinner branches until it snapped in her hands. She charged at the Weavess’ minions with the limb, screaming all kinds of profanities that Johnny noted down in his mind for future reference. The crows scattered, and she crouched under their tree for a moment, chest heaving. She brought her hands to her face and wailed, leaving the tree limb to lie limply in the grass. 

The pellar left his home with a bottle of something. Johnny watched him approach her gently, one hand on the crown of her head. He told her something that was too quiet and too far away for Johnny to hear. She stood, and, unexpectedly for the pellar, curled her arms around him and squeezed him tightly. He stroked her hair for a moment before leading her back to Johnny and Eskel. He told her to hold his head up so that he could administer the mystery mixture. “This will numb the physical pain. We will see then if this is the same curse I have seen before.” 

He poured the bottle into Eskel’s mouth and Luchezara and Johnny waited breathlessly for the Witcher’s own breath to slow. His brow smoothed, and the tight lines on his face disappeared. “Ah-hah…” The pellar confirmed. He pressed Eskel’s eyes open with his fingers. Johnny climbed up the cart, and Luchezara leaned over the side to look. “You see here?” 

Eskel’s pupils were expanding and contracting rapidly, eyes open but staring at nothing, and recognizing open. 

“What’s going on?” Johnny squeaked. 

“It’s the meat of the curse.” The pellar explained. “He is seeing horrors of his own imagination. A nightmare from which he cannot wake. “The Weavess seizes on fear and pain in the hearts of men, in their memories. She stitches them up into spider webs of the soul. They trap themselves. Even if they are mobile, they go mad before they die. I suspect the crone had every reason to make sure he could not fight back, as well.” He let Eskel’s eyelids slide closed again. 

Luchezara remembered how unstable Eskel’s emotions had been before he was paralyzed. How he was slow during a fight, looking beyond the monster of the day at nothing, in a kind of surprise or horror. Had he been seeing nightmares then, as well? 

“There was a man who was so afflicted in my childhood village. He would not bow to the Ladies, would not make a sacrifice like everyone else. He talked to himself, and claimed to see the dead. Which confused the young pellar, you see… I myself saw the dead, and never were there any around him. The village turned their heads away from the curse, and deemed him to be mad. They drove the man out. He was found dead in the stream from which the village took its drinking water.” 

“And how do I end it?” Luchezara asked. There was a hard edge of anger to her voice, now that she knew the curse’s nature, and what it was doing to Eskel. 

The pellar spent a moment in thought, seeming to think about how to say the words, rather than thinking over her options. “You must end the Weavess’ hold on this land, entirely, little one.” He told her, and then added, “ _ We  _ must.”

She breathed sharply. “You’ll help me?”

He nodded. “For a while, the forest was silent, and I could hear the breath of Mother Nature once again. Then it was again drowned out by the screams of crows. So many souls have been lost to the Ladies, waiting to return to the earth. I would not miss the chance to free them in assisting you. I’ll lead you to the Trail of Treats that surrounding villages once used to offer the Ladies their children. It will be the last time anyone walks that path.” 

Johnny piped up, “And I’ll be coming too. So you know… don’t mess it up.” 

Luchezara’s lower lip trembled and she curtly wiped her damp cheeks on her sleeve. “Thank you…. thank you…” she mumbled into the fabric. Then, looking up again, she blinked blearily into the silence. 

Johnny raised an eyebrow. “Well? Got a plan?” 

She bit down on her still shaking lip, somehow deep in thought and without a single thought at all. She stared into their expectant faces. Johnny was impatient and nervous; his eyes bored into hers when they met. The pellar looked calm and kind, but a line of worry crossed his forehead. Deep down, he didn’t know if she could. And neither did she. Luchezara couldn’t bear the two-person audience any more. With one heavy, shaking step after the other she began to pace around them and the cart. 

Finally she pulled some cloth out of Eskel’s saddlebags and marched behind the pellar’s hut without a word. 

“Hn…” the pellar wondered.

“So…” Johnny added. “Uh…. have you lived in Velen long?” 

“All my life.” 

“Me, too.” 

They filled the tense, fearful silence with small talk mundane as the only being who could do anything about their situation had walked out of sight without giving any instruction. 

Finally, Luchezara walked back to the cart in a pair of Eskel’s comically oversized clothes. 

“What’s the best way to fight a monster?” She asked them, with a forced bravado— perhaps if she pretended long enough, she’d actually feel it. 

“I dunno, Loochie. You’re the one what’s supposed to know that.” He shuffled towards the pellar and whispered, “I think she’s gone off her gourd…” 

The pellar chuckled breathily. “I know the answer. You call a Witcher. And if you don’t have a Witcher—“

“Get a Doppler.” She breathed in reply. “Once I take his form I’ll know what to do. Because he’d know what to do.”  _ Right _ ? She looked back at Eskel instinctively, but he was, predictably, silent.

“He’s twice your size.” Johnny reminded her. “How is this supposed to be possible?” 

“I can do it.” She assured them, shrugging Eskel’s stiff padded jacket over her shoulders. “I’ve taken a griffon’s form before.” 

Johnny crossed his arms and leaned in towards her with suspicion. “For how long?” 

“Uh… a minute. Maybe three,” She shrugged. “But he’s smaller than a griffon.” 

“Loochie, you can’t even wear the medallion without burning yourself. You think you’re gonna swing a silver sword around?” 

“Gloves.” She shot back. From the pockets of the jacket she pulled out his worn leather gloves. Predictably, they dwarfed her hands. “Gloves…!  _ Shit _ .” She remembered that they were fingerless. The top of her hand poked up out of the pile of wilted leather. She remembered the many conversations they had about why he’d cut the fingers off of his gloves. 

_ Why are you so happy to be cold in the winter?  _

_ Cold for a season is a small price to pay for improved dexterity all year.  _

_ You mean to say you don’t have a second pair of warmer gloves? At all?  _

Luchezara had chided him for treating his body like a machine at the ready for any villager’s request, rather than a human being who deserved comfort. She had gifted him a set of used kid gloves that she’d bought (not stolen, for once) from a traveling merchant on the way south. By that time the weather was too warm for them, and he eventually lost the gloves. 

“Well. I’m willing to burn a few fingers off for him. But he’ll never hear the end of it.” 

“Romantic.” The pellar said. 

She dragged Eskel’s silver sword from the cart by the strap on its sheath. She could feel the heat from the silver as if she was standing near an oven. She presented it to the pellar, along with a bottle of relict oil from their saddlebags. If she touched the stuff, she’d be poisoned. “Can you coat the blade with this?” 

He nodded, and pulled himself into the back of the cart. 

Luchezara took her place at the bench at the front of the cart, and Johnny slid in next to her. “I can direct you as far as the Trail of Treats at Crookback Bog.” He told her. Then, in a quieter tone, he added, “I’m scared to go any further.” 

They set off. Johnny told her what she might find past the Trail. He explained that Gran, the last person he knew to have been cursed by the Ladies, and that in the home where she once lived was a dark place where the Ladies supposedly plied their curses and observed all of Velen. She would find artifacts to break the curse there, and hopefully, the Weavess. 

They drove the rickety cart headed by two mismatched mounts towards Crookback Bog. The trees closer to the marsh were more gnarled, blackened, and peeling from rot. What few limbs remained were hanging posts for bodies, animal and man. The Weavess had made her grieving for her sisters known. 

“Remember,” the pellar murmured calmly. “This monster feeds off of fear.” 

“Well,” she gulped. “She’s about to feast.” 

“It’s not the time for jokes. And I don’t often understand them, anyway.”

“I wasn’t joking.” 

“Oh. Like I said, then.” 

The cart came to a creaking halt when Johnny gave the signal: a shrill, terrified cry of “Stop, stop here— _ stop, I said!”  _

She leapt off the cart and surveyed the beginning of the trail. The smell of all what was rotting in the tepid waters of the marsh curdled the air she inhaled. She pulled Eskel’s linen shirt over her nose. Between the smell of the swamp and her own breath she could smell him; she inhaled deeply, despite it all. “ _ Children _ once walked this by themselves?” 

Johnny rubbed the backs of his arms nervously. “It used to look more inviting.” 

The garlands of cookies and cakes that once hung over the trail were now moldy food for insects, birds, and the marsh’s bottom feeders. The animals picking the garlands clean looked half-dead themselves, but even in the afternoon, the sky had darkened with clouds too much to see. 

The pellar left the cart and placed Eskel’s silver sword in her open palms. Her fingers curled around the heat of it. “Is he still breathing…?” 

The old man nodded. “I’ll make sure he stays that way.” 

She gazed at him with a heavy gratitude in her large eyes that she couldn’t bear to express. The weight of it was too much; it sat in her throat like a bar of lead. 

“I… I just need a minute or two. What I do, it… isn’t very pretty to look at.” She finally rasped, turning away from them both. They took some paces back, no doubt happy to put distance between their bodies and the bog. 

She stared at Eskel’s prostrate body in the cart for a long moment from one of its sides while she stood on one of its wheels. The silence between them was a ringing in her ears. “I’m sorry that I’m doing this without your permission…” she whispered. “I know there are secrets, and memories you keep that aren’t for me to know.” Her fingers reached to brush his dark bangs from his face, like she always did. She heard his breath strain in his throat, and sobbed. “I can’t wait to hear your voice again.” 

She stepped away from the cart and faced the bog. With one deep inhale, her bones began to crack and pop. They swam and pulsed under her skin as her features rearranged. They made her taller, darker, wider, until Eskel stood in her place, albeit Eskel with one additional severe scar from the left corner of his lip to his ear. 

But this was not like any other form. Everything was suddenly loud, too loud. Light and shadow invaded her vision, jockeying for position as those slices of pupils adjusted to the world. A rush of sensations and memory flooded her mind and overflowed into her gut all at once. She couldn’t hear him. 

So she did what Eskel would have done. She lowered herself to the ground, placed the sword over her knees with her now alien hands at home in their gloves. She meditated. 

_ Eskel,  _ she repeated to herself silently, until his warm baritone voice reverberated from the back of her mind like a guide. 

_ Eskel!  _ She heard the way others called to him. Geralt. And Lambert. And Vesemir, whom she had never met, and who was dead, but whose voice was fortifying. Still fortifying. Still remembered.  _ Eskel. If you don’t steady your stance, you’ll never steady your sword.  _

_ Eskel! Aard is not for playing games. You’ll crack someone’s skull open like that, most likely your own.  _

_ You poor thing…. pitiful thing…  _ The purrs of an army of the continent’s prostitutes.  _ What was your name, again?  _

_ Eskel.  _ Geralt, but Geralt from long ago. Youthful, and boisterous.  _ Eskel!  _

Sensations began to join with the sounds. She felt Geralt’s embrace. One time, a hundred times. Deeper and tighter every year. 

Eskel’s fear of heights. The view of the first steep drop off from the Killer. A boy’s terrified gasps for breath. Luchezara peered over the edge with Eskel’s mind’s eye. The bottom of the cliff stretched away, uncannily. His eyes remained focused on another boy’s broken body in a puddle of deep red at its surging end. His friend Oleg. They shared a kiss once. And then he was dead.  _ Eskel!  _ It was Geralt again. The memory swirled and churned with his memory of the trials.  _ I’ll get a running start and jump to the other side. Then when you jump I’ll catch you.  _ Love and fear.  _ Don’t look down.  _ Geralt on the other side of the cliff. Geralt on another wooden slab. Geralt, who caught Eskel’s wrists before he fell. Eskel, who rattled against his restraints, screamed as hoarsely as he could after the seizures and the sick. Eskel, who still couldn’t stop them from taking Geralt away for more torture. 

Torture. Luchezara suddenly felt white hot heat across the face she shared with Eskel, and a sharp pain that seeped into her side. Deidre. The name echoed like a catapult shot in her mind, where a figure stood just behind her eyes. It’s face and words were wiped away, remaining only as a dark smear of a memory, but the pain remained.

_ Don’t look down.  _ Eskel’s hands in the memory were covered in blood. She reached up with a shaking hand to touch the scars, so sure she could feel the blood draining from them down her cheek and into her mouth. But when she did, only the warmth remained, and the memory of Deidre washed away. 

Pleasantly chilled, slim fingertips traced the grooves of the scars. 

_ Does it hurt?  _ Eskel was gazing at Luchezara. They were in bed together. From within Eskel’s mind she viewed how he saw her, remembered her, and what he remembered. He cast her in a sunny, dreamy haze, despite the memory being one of dark and cold Kaer Morhen.  _ I don’t want to touch them if it hurts you.  _

He noticed the imperceptible movement of her lips when she watched others speak.  _ It doesn’t hurt me _ .  _ Does your scar still hurt you?  _

_ Barely. But I think I’ve been kissing you too much, and that’s why.  _

_ We jumped too early into the kissing.  _

_ Uh-huh.  _ Her laughter in his mind was the sound of chimes.  _ But you’re deflecting. You flinch sometimes, when I touch them.  _

_ You’re the only person that’s ever wanted to.  _ All of his scars had felt the cool touch of her fingertips. 

_ All of your life is on your skin. And I know so little of it.  _

Insecurity. Fear. A hitched breath. But she caught his spiral before it began. 

_ I trace your life with my hands. and I make my own associations.  _ Her breath was sweet on his face. Impossible; they had just woken up.  _ Like how good it feels when you kiss me with your lip like that. I know that the most comfortable, warm place to lay my head at night is between the big, crescent shaped slash and the bite marks. There’s no one in the world like you.  _

_ There’s less Witchers now, but some still exist.  _

_ But you aren’t a Witcher to me. You’re an Eskel. Just like how my scar makes me Luchezara, fully, completely. We Dopplers have a strange idea of beauty.  _ She inched closer to him and laid a cool palm over his scars. Their heat dispersed under her touch. Her lips brushed his. He felt her smile against his.  _ You’ll chide me for saying so, but I like it when my scar is sore.  _ The groove in her waist was just the right size for his hands. A gasp, honey-sweet.  _ Eskel… _

Luchezara opened her yellow-gold eyes. She could breathe normally, deeply then. The sounds of the world and the sounds of Eskel’s mind had calmed. She stood, and gathered some of her own weapons, her daggers, from her saddlebags and fitted them between Eskel’s belt and trousers. 

When she spoke to her companions, the voice was his. “If you hear any horrible sounds, you take Eskel and you go back the way we came.” It would have been comical to hear her words from his mouth, were the situation not so dire. “Please.” 

Johnny and the pellar nodded, but just barely. She set her mouth in a thin line, and could feel the scarred cleft in his lip. “I mean it.” She turned, took another breath, and took her first steps onto the Trail of Treats. 

Johnny watched her walk away and then turned to the pellar. “Are we really going to retreat if we hear anything bad?”

He scoffed, already digging into the pouches tied to his robes for something. “Of course we won’t. I came here to draw trapped spirits from the bog from the clutches of that monster, and that I will do.” It was a powder he pulled from one of the leather pouches. He began sprinkling it around the entrance to the trail in a pattern. 

Johnny stomped his feet. “What can  _ I _ do?” 

“Go find me something alive. I need it to open a pathway between this world and the next. Nothing you’ll be sad to see die, little one.” 

An unnatural fog had already separated the two from Luchezara, who was taking careful steps along the path. Her new gait was getting more and more familiar. She’d tapped into Eskel’s decades of combat experience, or she’d hoped as much. There was a fine line between using someone else’s experience and losing one’s own consciousness to it. Luchezara had avoided it before; the personality of her primary form, the unfortunate Lia, had been so little known that all that remained were wisps of her imagination. From Geralt’s acquaintances, however, she’d heard of how little time the Doppler Biberveldt spent in the form of Caleb Menge, yet was nearly pulled into the thrall of Menge’s violence. 

And being Eskel was overwhelming, even when she’d become used to his heightened senses. Every bubble from the marsh, every twig snapping under an animal’s tread a quarter of a mile away, every slightly varied scent in the air, she could sense. But that was all there was. It was quiet, eerily quiet. She could barely see past the fog. In the distance there was a dark structure floating above the fog. In the unnatural darkness the barren limbs of trees looked like the building’s tendrils stretching out over its domain. It must have been where the anchors of curses were kept. 

Luchezara advanced toward the structure. She pulled at a string of candies and sweets. It fell to the mud. A biscuit cracked in two, and a swarm of ants bled from the fissure. 

A moment later, she heard the unmistakable sound of a human scream. A plea for help. 

“ _ Please….! Help me….”  _

Another wail. A different voice. Were there others trapped in the bog— misguided villagers, perhaps, looking to take on the Weavess themselves? 

“ _ Help….. help me….” _

_ “It hurts….! It hurts…”  _

The voices were many, deep into the marsh away from the trail. They were strained and rasping, and always sounded off together. Without a second thought, she took her first step into the murky water of the bog. It was what Eskel would do. It was what he was  _ doing _ . 

_ “Please….!”  _

“Hello…?” She called out into the fog. “Tell me where you are…!” 

“ _ Help me…!”  _

“How many people are with you?” 

She received only a shriek and a wail in response. Ghostly. She looked behind her, where the trail had disappeared. She was knee-deep in the bog when she realized nothing human was calling to her. 

As Luchezara turned back towards the voices, she was met with a skeletal snout. It emerged from the fog inch by inch. It was a bear, or was once a bear. It’s fur was matted and saturated with blood. The skin beneath, where there was skin, was necrotic. The muzzle of the creature was nothing but bleached bone and dripping, putrid skin. It’s eyes were hollow, and embedded in the white of the skull like a morbid bas relief were human skulls. Human teeth and animal teeth splintered out of its maw when it opened. From inside the maw came the lamenting shrieks that drew her out into the bog. 

“ _ It hurts…. it hurts me…!”  _

With eyes wide, breath caught, she shuffled back. She assumed it would be easier seeing such horrors while borrowing the mind of someone who had seen more in his time than most. But he had never seen this. Her right heel snagged against something hard in the water. She felt the pressure of the thing crack under her weight. The drop into the slick mud below made her lose her footing, and she fell back first into the water. The butt of her left palm was sliced by something. Shards of it pressed into the thick wool of her jacket. The snout of the decomposing bear sniffed at the air. She lifted her hand from the water to see the damage done to her palm. As the water fell from her hand, she found tendrils of slick, wet hair tangled in her fingers. Blonde, dark, grey. Now under the fog, she could see the bones and remains that riddled the surface of the bog like sea coral. As she struggled to rise from the mud, water splashed against foreheads and jagged teeth of cracked skulls. The remnants of skin, scalp, and hair bobbed placidly over the agitated water. To her left, a splintered femur had torn a hole into Eskel’s jacket. Luchezara shrieked. The sound of Eskel’s scream echoed across the bog. As if in mocking response, the bear lifted its head and let out a long, hoarse, polyphonic roar-- the screams of many. 

The fog eventually swallowed the screams. It carried back a high cackle, and a voice Luchezara remembered. “ _ What’s wrong, my dear…?”  _ It was the voice of the Weavess. “ _ Aren't you comfortable among the remains of the dead? It is all you are, after all. Your disguise isn’t fooling anyone. I hear it…”  _ The bear shuffled forward in the water. It pressed one of its boney paws on her right leg. Its muzzle was inches from her nose. It opened its jaws and another ghostly, desperate plea escaped directly to her ears. Luchezara shut her eyes, desperate for a moment to think. All she felt was fear. “ _ I hear your little rabbit heartbeat…” _

Johnny heard the screaming from the woods, along with a shout from the pellar. “Quick, little one…!” He’d been stalking a rabbit at the edge of the forest for sixty paces. He was no stranger to hunting small game, but this was the first time that making it into a game was not an option. He bit back a retort about scaring it away and leapt on it, shaping his fingers like a cage under his chest. It wriggled wildly and scratched at his palms as he got upright and ran as quickly, but as carefully as he could back to the pellar. 

Luchezara couldn’t reach the silver sword at her back from where she was trapped in the mud, although she could faintly feel its heat. She heard Eskel’s voice in her mind, overlapping with her own. Her thoughts, his thoughts.  _ Most times you don’t need to kill a bear. Bit of fire’ll send it running.  _ She brought up her hand and made an approximation of a sign he often used.  _ Igni. _ It was only sparks at first in her damp palm, barely enough to light kindling. She did it repeatedly, frantically, as the bear’s teeth got closer. Finally, her palm propelled a blast of flame, larger than he had ever done. She realized that this was probably in his capabilities always-- it was restraint he’d trained in himself, lest a stray flame do unintended damage. As the fire released, a face flashed across her mind’s eye. Another boy.  _ Dead _ , like Oleg. Half of his face was scorched, all the way up to the top of his scalp.  _ Vitaly. _ His name was Vitaly.  _ My igni didn’t kill him, the trial did. It was an accident. He never forgave me, and then he died.  _

The bear reeled back. Its head was aflame. The fire licked the empty sockets of its eyes. Burning dead flesh melted away into the water. It roared, and the souls trapped within wailed. Luchezara was able to free her leg from its paw and stumble up onto her feet. She heard Eskel’s voice again.  _ If I wanna have any chance, I need to get back to dry ground.  _ As much as she needed to keep an eye on the bear, walking backwards, sightless, onto bones was another recipe for disaster. She took one final look at the beast, who was widely shaking its head and roaring as the flames, more muted, were crawling languidly along its hackles. She pulled Eskel’s sword from its sheath on her back and turned, stomping heavily in the water and panting towards where she thought she had left the trail. 

Three cubits to the fences and rotting candies of the trail, she heard the bear’s roar and felt slam into her back. Her breath was knocked out of her chest, and the sword was knocked out of her hand. She fell face first into the water. The tips of her fingers, having just lost the sword, brushed the grassy edge of the trail. She just managed to turn her body to avoid drowning in the putrid muck when the bear trapped her again under its weight. Chunks of burned flesh and pitch black blood, the same that Eskel had coughed up for weeks, spattered her face and obscured her sight. When she was finally able to see through smeared and blurry vision, she realized she was staring right into its open maw. The shrieks assaulted her sensitive ears. 

“ _ HELP ME…..! I’M BURNING….! IT HURTS ME!” _

The beast’s jaws sank into her left shoulder, and violently shook her as if it planned to rend her arm away. The pain made her lose control of her form. Wooly, damp blonde curls plastered her forehead again, and her pained scream was no longer his. His saturated clothing weighed her down in the water. She pulled a dagger from his belt with her right hand and began to wildly stab at the bear’s side, but it did nothing to release the grip of its jaws. More black blood dripped thick like molasses onto her and into the water. 

She managed to concentrate for a moment on the only form that may be large and powerful enough to pull the bear apart, even for the minute or two she was able to use it. The werewolf, the cursed daughter from the village that seemed so far away from this alien place. She began to shift. The muscles of her shoulder expanded painfully under the pressure of the bear’s jaw, prying it open. The back of Eskel’s coat split, and his pants, shirt, and boots ripped away from her body. She seized on the bear with now large, sharp claws and ripped its bottom jaw away. It fell to the water among the collection of bones. It backed away, dazed for the moment, but it was still able to roar. This time, so was she. 

The pellar took the rabbit from Johnny’s hands and held it by its feet over the diagram he had poured into the dirt. “I heard them… the lost souls. They beg for their freedom. This will release them, and if they’re connected to her screams, they will release her, as well.” Johnny watched him split the rabbit from its belly to its neck with a knife and drip its blood over the pattern on the ground. He chanted something about the souls following the soul of the rabbit opening the door into the hereafter. He laid the rabbit’s corpse gingerly at the head of the trail. For a few moments, all was uncomfortably quiet. All of a sudden, a gust of icy wind blew out from the bog, over the body of the rabbit, and past the ears of Johnny and the pellar. It carried the faint sound of weeping and sorrowful wails. 

Luchezara kneeled breathlessly in the bog, waiting to rush the creature when it got close enough. It reared its front claws and rushed forward, unsettling the water’s open graves. Until it stopped in its tracks, and swayed. She watched it warily only two cubits away. It raised its head and released one final roar full of screams until they faded away into the fog. Its skin and what was left of its fur began to fall away in large pieces. Its bones rattled against one another and buckled, falling into the water one by one. She watched incredulously, returning to her primary form, as the bear disintegrated in front of her eyes. Suddenly, she stood alone on the trail, painting and bleeding heavily. She was nude save for Eskel’s torn jacket. It hung limp and askew from her shoulders. Tatters of pants and shoe leather trailed from her legs. The shapes in the bog began to mingle and blend with the fog in her vision. She bent down with a wince to pick up Eskel’s sword from where it had fallen. She didn’t know why the bear had fallen, or how. It may have been the work of the crone, but the bog was strangely silent. “Nothing to say now?” She shrieked hoarsely into the air to the Weavess. Crows alighted from a branch above her. She began to take slow, painful, methodical steps along the trail towards the building. 

It was an unassuming home when she’d reached it, albeit decrepit. It seemed to have been empty for a long time. The signs of a battle which led to its abandonment were all around-- collapsed walls, burned posts, and torn terrain. She entered the home, understanding that her bleeding shoulder wound wouldn’t give her time to leisurely investigate the premises. The smell of rotting flesh was even more pronounced inside than it was in the bog, with no discernable source. She remembered what Johnny had told her. There was a hatch door on the floor that led to the den where his Gran formerly communicated with the crones. She climbed down it with difficulty, one-handed. Inside the little underground den, human hair was spun like spiderwebs around a tattered tapestry next to an old table. Two of its figures, young, beautiful women, were sliced and torn away. Only one remained-- the Weavess. Crudely made woven and carved human figures were suspended in the webs of hair. She spotted Eskel’s-- a wooden figure with three slashes over its head and wrapped in his dark hair. She left Eskel’s sword on the rickety table to deal with the cursed figurines. With one of her daggers, she cut his down and began cutting away all the rest. If she died here with the Weavess, she at least could release all of her other victims. She turned his figurine around in her hands and held onto it tightly. 

Luchezara heard the familiar voice from behind her. “ _ You think it's so easy?”  _ It was the weavess. The tapestry warped and billowed around a three dimensional body, disfigured and gnarled in comparison to the beautiful woman in the fabric. A claw jutted out from behind the tapestry and dug into her wounded shoulder. She cried out. It drove her into one of the walls of the den. Her back slammed heavily against wooden slats on the wall. “ _ You thought you came here to be the hero? You thought it was  _ him  _ I wanted dead?”  _ The weavess’ other wrinkled claw closed around her neck. She felt her feet leave the ground. She watched the flies and hornets crawl and buzz around the abscesses in the rotting eye of the Weavess; she could smell her breath, the stench of rotted human flesh. “ _ Don’t you worry, my dear… I’ll take great care of your friends and your lover. Like I said those weeks ago, you aren’t the only one who can become a double. You stay here, with me.”  _

Johnny and the pellar waited nervously along the edge of the trail. All had gone silent since the pellar released the spirits from the bog. “I think we should go after her.” Johnny suggested abruptly. He wrung his hands and cracked his knuckles restlessly. 

“We will not.” The pellar corrected him. “We all knew the risks. We must have some faith in Mother Nature. It was She who created creatures like you, like Dopplers, before humans ever arrived. It is She who will outlast the Ladies. Besides, we cannot leave the Witcher to die alone, should something happen to us.” 

Minutes passed. A slight figure began to emerge from the fog, light hair and an oversized red jacket. She was dragging a bloodied sword. 

“It’s her,” The pellar breathed. 

_ “You’re alive!”  _ Johnny exclaimed. He ran to her, but she put a hand up to stop him. 

She sobbed. “And the Weavess is dead. I just want to get out of here… please…” 

They helped her into the cart, and the pellar drove the horses back in the direction towards his cabin. She didn’t want to speak, which seemed only natural to Johnny after what she’d presumably just been through. Although, it was strange to him that she was silent for so long. She didn’t even ask about Eskel. Was she hurt?

“Loochie,” He whispered behind him to her from his spot at the front of the cart. Strangely, she didn’t respond. He climbed into the back of the cart to get her attention, but noticed she was holding on to the blade of Eskel’s unsheathed sword with both hands. The sword should have burned her hands and poisoned her. She held on to it as if it was only steel and iron. “Loochie?” 

She didn’t answer. “Luchezara.” He repeated. Only then did she raise her face to him in recognition. But he never called her ‘Luchezara.’

“Mr. Pellar, stop the cart!” Johnny shouted. The pellar was confused, but did as he was asked. Johnny ripped the sword from the hands of the False Luchezara. It disintegrated into black ash and hair once it was separated from her body. The familiar looking figure flashed him a sickeningly wide grin that didn’t reach her eyes. “ _ Clever thing _ ,” it said, in the Weavess’ voice. He jumped out of the cart before it came to a full stop. “It’s not her…!” He was running to the trail before the pellar could ask any questions. “It’s a trap! It’s not her! She’s in trouble!” And Johnny was the only one who knew Crookback Bog well enough to save her. He watched as the pellar grabbed the figure’s arm. Like her sword, she disintegrated into black ash, grinning widely at him with wide eyes all the while. He turned to run towards the former home and prison of his Gran, and didn’t look back. 

Back under the building, Luchezara was struggling to breathe under the vice-like grip of the Weavess. She scratched at the crone’s arm, but elicited laughter in response. 

“ _ It’s you. It’s you I wanted to lure here,”  _ The crone said, voice artificially saccharine and triumphant. “ _ So that you could learn your proper place. Your kind once groveled on the forest floor and in the swamp like hairless rats, you know. Harmless. Deferential to all-- in a wolf pack, or among the deer. You knew the direction of the food chain and your place among relicts. You were even lesser than animals, so lowly that you had to become them in order to avoid becoming prey. Dopplers are bottom-feeders… grovelers of the highest order.”  _

Luchezara whimpered under the pressure of the Weavess’ grip. 

The crone cackled. “ _ It’s that voice…  _ that voice! _ That voice that you got after all of you realized you could become humans just as easily. Humans, and their pride. Humans, and their schemes. Humans, and their  _ hubris! _ That’s what brought you back to Velen, is it not? Hubris. The belief that you could wrest Velen from my hands, when deep down, you’re still nothing but a pathetic  _ creature… _ You’re an oversized rat in a dress, wearing the face of a dead woman… You were once afraid of that, weren’t you…? That someone would know that you were wearing the skin of poor, murdered Lia... ”  _ The Weavess’ own form began to twist and change, first into the shape of the young woman from the tapestry, then to Neszka, the sex worker who had led her to the poacher’s trap. Luchezara blinked and Diederich the poacher was in front of her instead, with her knife plunged into his eye. 

“ _ If you want to die like a human, you’ll die just like her… naked and forgotten, underground.”  _ The Weavess tightened her grip.  _ “Do you not remember how she died…? Surely you should. Wasn’t that her freshest memory…?”  _ Luchezara’s vision began to blur. She struggled to keep her eyes open. In between blinks she saw a face that had been previously unfamiliar. He had short, dark hair and a gaunt face with deep set blue eyes. It was him. The man who strangled Lia in the sewer, and left her body for Luchezara to find. Her eyes peeled open wide in terror. 

Behind the weavess, the hatch to the room was thrown open. Light streamed in. She saw Johnny jump down into the room. Luchezara began to make any noise she could-- gargled, weak hiccups-- to distract the Weavess.  _ “Did you not learn the lesson I brought you here to learn, you filthy little creature…?! That human voice… that troublesome voice… now that you’re pretending to be a person, all you want to do is talk back… Little bitch...”  _ Luchezara kicked a leg weakly in the direction of Eskel’s sword on the tableas the Weavess curled another hand over her mouth and began to slam her head into the wall. Johnny bit his bottom lip to brace himself for the pain of holding it. He reached up onto the table and grabbed the sword by the hilt. He handed it off to her limp right hand under the feet of the preoccupied crone. With her hand gripping the burning hilt and his palms on the butt of the sword to offer more force to her weakened thrust, they sank the sword into the ribs of the Weavess. Luchezara felt a twitch in the crone’s fingers over her throat. Her form flickered and rippled back to that of the beautiful young woman and slowly back to the crone. She slumped over to observe the silver sword in her side and the face of Johnny, paralyzed in fear next to the monster who had once intended to steal his voice forever. Her face and body began wasting away from the wound out. The sword was burning her like a dry bit of wood. It was cracking her apart like ancient bone. “ _ Fucking…. Animals….!”  _ She cried out. She fell to the floor with Luchezara, who began coughing and choking on her ashes as she struggled to breathe through her half-collapsed throat. 

Her ears were ringing, but she could hear Johnny. “Loochie….? Loochie!” He ran to her, just as her vision went black. 

\--------------------------------------------

Her eyes slowly fluttered open and adjusted to the sunlight dancing across the roof of the pellar’s hut that filtered in through an open window. She turned to her left and saw him. Eskel. They were in a bed together. His eyes were closed. Her heart began to beat faster; she didn’t know if he was breathing. Had she been too late?

“ _ Eskel-- _ ” She murmured. It was barely a whisper; her throat felt like it was full of glass. She tried to roll over onto her side to shove him, but quickly and painfully remembered the wound in her shoulder. “ _ ESKEL-- _ ” She didn’t know what else she could do, so she kicked him and waited, with a grim, drawn face. 

His eyelids split open as he exhaled sharply. He curled in on himself and hugged his kicked leg. “Aagh…!  _ FUCK!  _ Johnny, I  _ told you _ , stop fucking jumping into the bed like that when she’s--” 

He sat up to berate what he thought was the Godling some more, only to see her laying there, just as surprised as he was, stiff as a board from anxiety. “ _ Looch…. _ You’re alive-- you’re awake…!” He gripped her face tightly, unable to touch her anywhere else for fear he might make her injuries worse. 

She began to cry into his hands and smiled. She lifted an arm to point to him and brush his cheek with her fingers in turn. “ _ You’re alive… and you’re awake…!”  _ She tried desperately to speak. 

“Don’t say anything… you don’t have to say anything…” He assured her. He kissed her cheeks, and she inhaled his warm, living scent. The bruises around her neck were so purple that they were nearly black. The left side of her torso was mummified in gauze and linens. He propped her up with his pillows on the makeshift bed that the pellar had made for him. He told her all about his own recuperation, and how she had been unconscious for nearly a week. What Johnny had said about how the Pellar had felled the undead bear and released the spirits of the bog. How he had slept by her side to hear even the faintest signs of returning life; and how Johnny had objected, worried that he would somehow roll over and crush her. How Johnny and the pellar had become fast friends, and all about the pellar’s goat, Princess. 

“She just goes nuts for these wild strawberries, Looch, you gotta see it--” 

Luchezara squeaked out a laugh and wiped the rest of her relieved tears from her cheeks. He was alive. She’d done it, somehow she’d done it. But she hadn’t done it alone. Before she could attempt to ask where their friends were, Johnny came marching through a burst open door with an armful of mushrooms in a basket. The pellar followed behind him. “ _ Someone  _ was too good to get up early and go pick mushrooms with us, so  _ someone _ isn’t going to get any mushrooms for--” He caught sight of Luchezara sitting up and smiling. The mushrooms spilled out of his hands and the basket rattled to the floor. 

“LOOCHIE!” He leapt onto the bed and rushed to her side. The pellar, like always, only smiled calmly, more relieved than usual. Behind him a goat leisurely strolled into the 

“Johnny I said quit jumping!” 

“Stuff it, Eskel--  _ LOOCHIE,  _ you’re awake!! We  _ did it,  _ Loochie! We got her! It was absolutely  _ magnificent _ , I tell you! Do you remember? You were like--” He flailed his arms around. “And  _ I  _ was like--” He did it again. “And then  _ we both  _ were like--  _ wha-POW! SHINGGG!”  _ He made his little hand into the shape of a blade and sliced through the sunlight. She could only nod and bite down on her uncontrollable smile. It was beginning to strain her throat. 

“Alright, already,” Eskel declared, gently pushing Johnny away from the bed. “Pick up your damn mushrooms and give her some air. He grumbled, but did as he was told. 

“Eskel…” Luchezara rasped. He leaned in close when she gestured with her hand by patting him on the cheek. “I know… I know how this may sound now but… I… I don’t suppose you want to get away from Velen for a little while…?” 

He laughed, remembering his diatribe against it before all of this had happened. “Gods… I’d love that. Where to?”

“Novigrad.”

“ _ Novigrad?” _ He asked incredulously. She swallowed painfully and nodded. “Why the hell’d you ever want to go back to Novigrad?” How the hell would he ever sneak a doppler back  _ into  _ Novigrad?”

“I  _ know… _ ” She whispered in his ear. She had the chance to avenge the woman who had unwittingly given her a new life in her own lonely and violent death. “ _ I know who killed her… I saw him… I saw who killed Lia.”  _

  
  



End file.
